Compressive optical imaging with a photonic lantern

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel high-resolution microendoscopy technique using a multicore fibre with a photonic lantern, enabling stable multimode pattern projection and single-pixel compressive imaging for biological applications.

Contribution

It presents a new method combining a photonic lantern with a multicore fibre for stable multimode pattern projection and demonstrates single-pixel compressive imaging in microendoscopy.

Findings

Stable multimode patterns can be generated and projected from the fibre.

Single-pixel imaging successfully reconstructs objects using the proposed method.

The approach enables high-resolution, flexible in-vivo imaging with fibre movement resilience.

Abstract

The thin and flexible nature of optical fibres often makes them the ideal technology to view biological processes in-vivo, but current microendoscopic approaches are limited in spatial resolution. Here, we demonstrate a new route to high resolution microendoscopy using a multicore fibre (MCF) with an adiabatic multimode-to-singlemode photonic lantern transition formed at the distal end by tapering. We show that distinct multimode patterns of light can be projected from the output of the lantern by individually exciting the single-mode MCF cores, and that these patterns are highly stable to fibre movement. This capability is then exploited to demonstrate a form of single-pixel imaging, where a single pixel detector is used to detect the fraction of light transmitted through the object for each multimode pattern. A custom compressive imaging algorithm we call SARA-COIL is used to reconstruct the object using only the pre-measured multimode patterns themselves and the detector signals.