Characterization of an imaging multimode optical fiber using a digital micro-mirror device based single-beam system

This work demonstrates experimental approaches to characterize a single multimode fiber imaging system without a reference beam. Spatial light modulation is performed with a digital micro-mirror device that enables high-speed binary amplitude modulation. Intensity-only images are recorded by the camera and processed by a Bayesian inference based algorithm to retrieve the phase of the output optical field as well as the transmission matrix of the fiber. The calculated transmission matrix is validated by three standards: prediction accuracy, transmission imaging, and focus generation. Also, it is found that information on mode count and eigenchannels can be extracted from the transmission matrix by singular value decomposition. This paves the way for a more compact and cheaper single multimode fiber imaging system for many demanding imaging tasks.