Experimental Demonstration of Multimode Fiber Active Illuminated Imaging via Deep Learning

Multimode fibers (MMFs) have been widely investigated for transmitting images due to the large number of spatial modes supported by the small core diameter. We propose an active illuminated fiber imaging system based on a MMF coupler. Without requiring the external illumination, the transmission of images and the illumination light are conducted by the same imaging fiber. In addition, we propose a new deep learning-based encoder-decoder network with a full-connected (FC) layer for the image reconstruction. We demonstrate an experiment of transmitting cell images via a 1.6 m long MMF coupler. We conduct experiment to verify the effectiveness of the active illuminated MMF imaging system. Compared with the vanilla encoder-decoder structure, the proposed network with the FC layer provides more accurate results. The proposed system allows a more compact endoscopic imaging without the external illumination.