Lensless wide-field 3D fiber endoscopy through scattering media using synthetic wavelength holography
Abstract
Minimally invasive imaging with fiber optic endoscopes is crucial for in vivo visualization of tissue morphology, as it supports applications such as early detection of tumors. However, imaging performance of conventional fiber endoscopes is limited when scattering layers are present between target and the distal end of endoscope. This limitation is particularly relevant in biomedicine, where targets such as early stage lesions or blood clots can be obscured by scattering tissue. To address this challenge, we present a lensless endoscopic imaging approach based on synthetic wavelength holography (SWH). SWH is a computational imaging technique in which two optical fields acquired at closely spaced wavelengths are combined to synthesize a field at a longer synthetic wavelength. As the field at longer wavelengths is less sensitive to path length perturbations, this approach can enable endoscopic recovery of holographic information despite scattering in the intervening tissue. In addition, because the synthetic field is assembled from scattered optical fields with larger optical étendue, our approach can extend the field of view (FoV) beyond the numerical aperture of the fiber. In this paper, we present the first demonstration of an SWH-based lensless endoscope using a multicore multimode fiber. We experimentally recover three-dimensional images of objects hidden behind scattering layers and through real biological tissue, with a spatial resolution of ≈ 500 μm. We further demonstrate recovery of object information over an extended FoV of 46° without any distal optics. These results suggest a practical path toward extending fiber endoscopy for wide-field, three-dimensional imaging through scattering media.
Related
- Reference-free per-measurement assessment of lensless reconstruction quality under imperfect PSF models
- RTLViT: real-time lensless reconstruction with a lightweight vision transformer
- Role of Spatial Coherence in Single-Shot Lensless Image Reconstruction
- Physics-prior-guided compensation for spatially varying degradation in confocal endoscopy
- Faithful reconstruction of orthogonal circular polarization holography modulated by spatial frequency in TI/PMMA photopolymers
BibTeX
@misc{balaji2026lensless,
title = {{Lensless wide-field 3D fiber endoscopy through scattering media using synthetic wavelength holography}},
author = {Muralidhar Madabhushi Balaji and Parker Liu and Patrick Cornwall and Tianyi Wang and Jürgen Czarske and Florian Willomitzer},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.29110},
eprint = {2605.29110},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29110},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Lensless wide-field 3D fiber endoscopy through scattering media using synthetic wavelength holography
AU - Muralidhar Madabhushi Balaji
AU - Parker Liu
AU - Patrick Cornwall
AU - Tianyi Wang
AU - Jürgen Czarske
AU - Florian Willomitzer
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/10
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.29110
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29110
AB - Minimally invasive imaging with fiber optic endoscopes is crucial for in vivo visualization of tissue morphology, as it supports applications such as early detection of tumors. However, imaging performance of conventional fiber endoscopes is limited when scattering layers are present between target and the distal end of endoscope. This limitation is particularly relevant in biomedicine, where targets such as early stage lesions or blood clots can be obscured by scattering tissue. To address this challenge, we present a lensless endoscopic imaging approach based on synthetic wavelength holography (SWH). SWH is a computational imaging technique in which two optical fields acquired at closely spaced wavelengths are combined to synthesize a field at a longer synthetic wavelength. As the field at longer wavelengths is less sensitive to path length perturbations, this approach can enable endoscopic recovery of holographic information despite scattering in the intervening tissue. In addition, because the synthetic field is assembled from scattered optical fields with larger optical étendue, our approach can extend the field of view (FoV) beyond the numerical aperture of the fiber. In this paper, we present the first demonstration of an SWH-based lensless endoscope using a multicore multimode fiber. We experimentally recover three-dimensional images of objects hidden behind scattering layers and through real biological tissue, with a spatial resolution of ≈ 500 μm. We further demonstrate recovery of object information over an extended FoV of 46° without any distal optics. These results suggest a practical path toward extending fiber endoscopy for wide-field, three-dimensional imaging through scattering media.
ER -