Location of Optical Fibers for the Calibration of Incoherent Optical Fiber Bundles for Image Transmission

Image transmission by incoherent optical fiber bundles (IOFBs) requires prior calibration to obtain the spatial in-out fiber correspondence to reconstruct the image captured by the pseudocamera. This information is recorded in a lookup table (LUT), which is later used for reordering the fiber positions and reconstructing the original image. This paper shows how to apply a fiber detection process to minimize the calibration time and improve the quality of the recovered image. Two different fiber detection methods were developed. The former uses the circular Hough transform algorithm based on the image gradient. The second algorithm combines a number of morphological transformations with distance transform. The results demonstrate that this technique provides a remarkable reduction in the processing time while improving fiber detection accuracy.