Ultra-wide-angle Wireless Endoscope with a Backend-camera-controller Architecture

This paper presents a wireless endoscope with an ultra-wide FOV (Field of View) of 130° and HD resolution (1280×720 pixels). The proposed endoscope consists of a camera head, cable, camera controller, and wireless handle. The lens module with a 150° degrees AOV (Angle of View) is achieved using the plastic injection-molding process to reduce manufacturing costs. A serial CMOS image sensor using the MIPI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface) CSI-2 (Camera Serial Interface-2) interface physically separates the camera processor from the camera head. The camera head and the cable have a compact structure due to the BCC (Backend-Camera-Controller) architecture. The size of the camera head and the camera controller is 8×8×26 mm and 7×55 mm, respectively. The wireless handle supports a UWB (Ultra-Wide-Band) or a Wi-Fi communication to transmit video data. The UWB link supports a maximum data transfer rate of ~37 Mbps to transmit video data with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels at a frame rate of 30 fps in the MJPEG (Motion JPEG) format. Although the Wi-Fi link provides a lower data transfer rate (~8 Mbps Max.), it has the advantage of flexible interoperability with various mobile devices. The latency of the UWB link is measured to be ~0.1 sec. The Wi-Fi link has a larger latency (~0.5 sec) due to its lower data transfer rate. The proposed endoscope demonstrates the feasibility of a high-performance yet low-cost wireless endoscope using the BCC architecture. To the best of the author's knowledge, the proposed endoscope has the largest FOV among all presently existing wireless endoscopes.