New single-pixel camera design, but this time using multicore fibers (MCF) and a photonic lantern instead of a spatial light modulator. Cool!

The fundamental idea is to excite one of the cores of a MCF. Then, light propagates through the fiber, which has a photonic lantern at the tip that generates a random-like light pattern at its tip. Exciting different cores of the MCF generates different light patterns at the end of the fiber, which can be used to obtain images using the single-pixel imaging formalism.

There is more cool stuff in the paper, for example the Compressive Sensing algorithm the authors are using, using positivity constraints. This is indeed quite relevant if you want to get high quality images, because of the reduced number of cores present in the MCF (remember, 1 core = 1 pattern, and the number of patterns determines the spatial resolution of the image in a single-pixel camera). It is also nice that there is available code from the authors here.

Some experimental/simulation results (nice Smash logo there!). Extracted from

Debaditya Choudhury et al., “Compressive optical imaging with a photonic lantern,” at https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.01288

Compressive optical imaging with a photonic lantern

by Debaditya Choudhury et al., at arXiv

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.