Study On Image Quality Evaluation Of Fiber Optical Taper By Modulation Transfer Function

As a kind of optical image transfer component, fiber optic taper can provide image transfer with a certain scale but without distortion. The scale, with which the image is magnified or diminished by the taper, is decided by the rate of the diameter of the two ends of the taper. Because of these advantages, the fiber optic taper has become more important and more widely used in the integrated taper assembly image intensified sensors for military and medical imaging application and so on. As a relay optical component, the imaging quality of the fiber optic taper is very important. How to evaluate the quality of the output image from fiber optic taper appropriately and efficiently becomes a technological problem.Optical Transfer Function is widely applied as a standard of image evaluation of traditional optical component, which has many special advantages such as objective, comprehensive and measurable. Modulation Transfer Function is the modulus of the Optical Transfer Function. Because fiber optic taper is of a mosaic array architecture, there are some new problems need to be resolved in using MTF evaluation. How to evaluate the image quality of fiber optical taper by MTF and design a simple and exercisable method to measure the MTF of the taper are the central problems to be resolved in this article.The main research contents and their achievements are as follows:According to the definition of the MTF and the character of the fiber optical taper imaging, the theoretical analysis of MTF of the fiber optical taper has been gotten, which makes the method of image quality evaluation of the fiber optical taper agree with the traditional optical component.