Abstract
Optical fiberscopes have been used extensively as a powerful means for medical inner scope or nondestructive testing. In the conventional devices, however, one fiber is used as one pixel, hence bundled fibers of several tens thousands should be used resulting in fairly thick fiberscope.
In this paper, a new fiberscope which uses only one fiber for image transmission is shown. The image distortion is compensated by using the phase conjugated wave which is generated at the output of the fiber and the result is retransmitted through the same fiber.
The special features of the proposed system are as follows; i) introduction of time-shearing write and read processes reduced the severe conditions which are required for the fiber and it is also very effective for the elimination of extra noise waves, ii) using the special feature of phase conjugated wave it becomes possible to reconstruct any desired cross-section of 3-D object field, and iii) the diameter of the fiberscope is reduced to two times of a fiber and ultra-thin fiberscope is realized. The usefullness of these techniques are shown by the constructed system.
