Digital confocal microscopy through a multimode fiber

Confocal laser-scanning microscopy is a well-known optical imaging method where a pinhole is used in the illumination and detection pathways of a normal microscope, in order to selectively excite and detect a particular focal volume. The advantage of this method is a significant increase in contrast, due to the rejection of background contributions to the signal. Here, we propose to apply this method in the context of multimode fiber endoscopy. Due to modal scrambling, it is not possible to use a physical pinhole to filter light signals that have travel through multimode fibers. Instead, we use a transmission matrix approach to characterize the propagation of light through the fiber, and we apply the filtering operation in the digital domain.