A Study on Super-Resolution for Images Captured by Super-Thin Fiberscope

Abstract

Compared with the conventional endoscope attached CCD camera at the tip, fiberscope has some advantages, i.e., we can reduce the diameter of the tip for imaging drastically, and we can flexibly capture image by bending it along with the portion to be observed. Therefore, fiberscope is expected to be a new imaging device that increases the possibility supporting diagnosis and operation in medical front. In particular, if we want to capture image inside a very narrow tube like blood vessel, super-thin fiberscope is quite useful. However, the color information in the image captured by fiberscope depends on the number of fibers, since one single optical fiber can convey only one color information. Thus, the less number of fibers in fiberscope, the more color information is lost. Also, honey-comb structure noise caused by the clad which does not contribute to transmit any color signal seriously deteriorates the quality of image captured. In this work, we study on the method of the super-resolution to improve the resolution of images captured by super-thin fiberscope with the limited number of fibers about 5,000 fibers.