Hyperspectral Dual-Comb Compressive Imaging for Minimally-Invasive Video-Rate Endomicroscopy

Abstract: Endoscopic imaging is essential for real-time visualization of internal organs, yet conventional systems remain bulky, complex, and expensive due to their reliance on large, multi-element optical components. This limits their accessibility to delicate or constrained anatomical regions. Achieving real-time, high-resolution endomicroscopy using compact, low-cost hardware at the hundred-micron scale remains an unsolved challenge. Optical fibers offer a promising route toward miniaturization by providing sub-millimeter-scale imaging channels; however, existing fiber-based methods typically rely on raster scanning or multicore bundles, which limit the resolution and imaging speed. In this work, we overcome these limitations by integrating dual-comb interferometry with compressive ghost imaging and advanced computational reconstruction. Our technique, hyperspectral dual-comb compressive imaging, utilizes optical frequency combs to generate wavelength-multiplexed speckle patterns that are delivered through a single-core fiber and detected by a single-pixel photodetector. This parallel speckle illumination and detection enable snapshot compression and acquisition of image information using zero-dimensional hardware, completely eliminating the need for both spatial and spectral scanning. To decode these highly compressed signals, we develop a transformer-based deep learning model capable of rapid, high-fidelity image reconstruction at extremely low sampling ratios. This approach significantly outperforms classical ghost imaging methods in both speed and accuracy, achieving video-rate imaging with a dramatically simplified optical front-end. Our results represent a major advance toward minimally invasive, cost-effective endomicroscopy and provide a generalizable platform for optical sensing in applications where hardware constraints are critical.