Optical Brush-Imaging with Detached Optical Probes and Recalibration Through Time of Flight Technique

An open-ended, incoherent bundle of optical fibers transmits light from a nearby scene. A camera captures images of the back end of the fiber bundle. Because the fiber bundle is incoherent, the captured image is shuffled, in the sense that the relative position of pixels in the image differs from the relative position of the scene regions that correspond to the pixels. Calibration is performed in order to map from the front end positions to the back-end positions of the fibers. In the calibration, pulses of light are delivered, in such a way that the time at which light reflecting from a given pulse enters a given fiber directly correlates to the position of the front end of the given fiber. A time-of-flight sensor takes measurements indicative of these time signatures. Based on the map obtained from calibration, a computer de-shuffles the image.