Design of Micro-Ball endoscopy system

In order to reduce the miss rate of the wireless capsule endoscopy and help physicians to read endoscopic images in an easier manner, this paper proposes a Micro-Ball endoscopy system which is equipped with six cameras. This work develops key techniques to miniaturize the size and lower the power consumption of the Micro-Ball. The Micro-Ball is activated by a wireless power supply unit with a rectifying efficiency of 93.6%. An effective image post-processing method for deriving 2D representation of the digestive tract wall is also presented. The Micro-Ball integrates a low-power attitude sensing unit to provide information for image registration and Micro-Ball control. These designs assure that the Micro-Ball has small size (diameter less than 15mm), can work for more than 15 hours, at an image resolution of 480×480 and an image frame rate of 2fps, when powered by 1.55V@60mAh battery. The effectiveness of the Micro-Ball system has been verified by an FPGA demonstration system.