Hundreds of tube-leaky optical fibers having a bundled structure were fabricated by glass drawing technique for endoscopic infrared-thermal imaging. In these tube-leaky optical fibers, by setting the thickness of glass wall to a quarter-wavelength optical thickness, light is confined in the air core as a leaky mode with a low loss. We measured the transmission losses of bundled fibers and found that bundled tube-leaky fibers have low transmission losses in spite of the small pixel size. We then tried to deriver thermal images with the bundled fibers and detected the thermal images of a finger with a temperature of about 32°C.
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