Improving the uniformity of luminous system in radial imaging capsule endoscope system

Abstract

This study concerns the illumination system in a radial imaging capsule endoscope (RICE). Uniformly illuminating the object is difficult because the intensity of the light from the light emitting diodes (LEDs) varies with angular displacement. When light is emitted from the surface of the LED, it first encounters the cone mirror, from which it is reflected, before directly passing through the lenses and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. The light that is strongly reflected from the transparent view window (TVW) propagates again to the cone mirror, to be reflected and to pass through the lenses and CMOS sensor. The above two phenomena cause overblooming on the image plane. Overblooming causes nonuniform illumination on the image plane and consequently reduced image quality. In this work, optical design software was utilized to construct a photometric model for the optimal design of the LED illumination system. Based on the original RICE model, this paper proposes an optimal design to improve the uniformity of the illumination. The illumination uniformity in the RICE is increased from its original value of 0.128 to 0.69, greatly improving light uniformity. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. [DOI: 10.1117/1.OE.52.2.023003]