Development of 3D holographic endoscope

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.2211569

Here we present the development of a 3D holographic endoscope with an interferometer built around a commercial rigid endoscope. We consider recording the holograms with coherent and incoherent light separately without compromising the white light imaging capacity of the endoscope. In coherent light based recording, reference wave required for the hologram is obtained in two different ways. First, as in the classical holography, splitting the laser beam before the object illumination, and secondly creating the reference beam from the object beam itself. This second method does not require path-length matching between the object wave and the reference wave, and it allows the usage of short coherence length light sources. For incoherent light based holographic recordings various interferometric configurations are considered. Experimental results on both illumination conditions are presented.