US 5,515,470 AGranted

Process for reconstructing a picture coupled into a fiber optical bundle made of optical fibers

AssigneeFraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V.

InventorsEckard Eikelmann, Stefan Keller, Tilo Pfeifer

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Abstract

A process for reconstructing a picture coupled into a fiber optical bundle 1) comprising optical fibers (2) is provided. It is immaterial for this process whether the optical fibers (2) are parallel or totally random in the fiber optical bundle (1). The prerequisite is that the launching sided and output sided coordinates of each optical fiber (2) are known. The picture coupled into the launching side (3) is reconstructed with the aid of the gray tones passed on by the optical fibers (2) to the output side (4). To this end a grid (5), comprising grid field (6) that are connected together without any gaps, is laid over the launching sided arrangement of the optical fibers (2). Assigned to each grid field (6) is a gray tone, which comprises through addition fractions of the output sided, average gray tones of all of the optical fibers (2), which are at least partially overlapped by the grid field (6), whereby such a fraction corresponds to the percentage of the area of the optical fiber overlapped by the grid field (6) to the total cross sectional area of the optical fiber (2). The grid (5) provided with gray tones is finally reproduced on a video screen.

Claims19

Dependent claims

Process for reconstructing a picture, coupled into a fiber optical bundle, which exhibits a launching side and an output side and is made of optical fibers, whereby the launching side and the output side coordinates of each individual optical fiber are known and can be assigned to each other, wherein

when the picture is coupled in, the output side is taken by a camera, exhibiting a sensor area with discrete sensor elements,
wherein a grid, comprising grid fields that are connected together without any gaps, is laid over the launching side configuration of the optical fibers,
wherein the gray tones, which are picked up by the sensor elements and relate to an optical fiber, are distributed in such a manner on the gird fields overlapping with this optical fiber that each of these grid fields obtains from a gray tone, whose average is formed via at least one part of the output side fiber cross section of said optical fiber, a gray tone percentage, which corresponds to the area percentage of the area, overlapped by the respective grid field, at the fiber cross sectional area,
wherein a grid field gray tone is found by adding all of the gray tone percentages of a grid field, and
wherein the grid with the grid field gray tones is reproduced via a video screen.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.