A high precision recipe for correcting images distorted by a tapered fiber optic

Abstract

Images captured with a tapered fiber optic camera show significant spatial distortion mainly because the spatial orientation of the fiber bundles is not identical at each end of the taper. We present three different techniques for the automatic distortion correction of images acquired with a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera bonded to a tapered optical fiber. In this paper we report — (i) comparison of various methods for distortion correction (ii) extensive quantitative analysis of the techniques and (iii) experiments carried out using a high resolution fiber optic camera. A pinhole array was used to find control points in the distorted image space. These control points were then associated with their known true coordinates. To apply geometric correction, three different approaches were investigated — global polynomial fitting, local polynomial fitting and triangulated interpolation. Sub-pixel accuracy was achieved in all approaches, but the experimental results reveal that the triangulated interpolation gave the most satisfactory result for the distortion correction. The effect of proper alignment of the mask with the fiber optic taper (FOT) camera was also investigated. It was found that the overall dewarping error is minimal when the mask is almost parallel to the CCD.