Stereoscopic imaging capsule endoscopy in a single lens design based on prisms and polarizers

Abstract

This paper proposes a capsule endoscopy (CE) with stereoscopic imaging that is based on a single lens design. There is a prism array installed in front of the single lens to merge two separate fields of views (FOVs) into the field of the lens. Such a merging field involves two view information. A scheme applies a pair of orthogonal polarizations coated on the outside faces of individual prisms for multiplexing these two different views. The rays from the two fields go through the single lens to form the separate images by applying polarization filter with interleaving arrangement (that is, space division process) of the states in front of the image sensor. Another way is to apply a liquid crystal array (LCA) with active polarization function in time division process to receive the separate images. We employ the optical software, Zemax, to simulate and analyze the proposed CE. The simulation results show that the proposed CE can successfully receive the two field images in the image plane by using only a single lens.