An Optical Video Transmission for a High-Resolution Power-over-Fiber Camera System

We demonstrate an optical video transmission that enables a high-resolution camera head with low power consumption. Surveillance camera systems are essential for modern society, and the power-over-fiber (PoF) camera system has been studied to enable it to be deployed in places far from a control office and where no stable power supply is installed. The previously demonstrated PoF camera system transmits image sensor (IS) signals via a serializer. However, the video resolution is as low as 0.3 Mpixel because the power consumption of the serializer is non-negligibly larger than the supplied power from the PoF system. In this paper, we investigate the optical transmission of the IS signals without the serializer. Optical signals directly modulated by the IS signal achieved a 5-km video transmission over a standard single-mode fiber. Based on the experimental results, we estimated the power consumption of the camera head depending on the video resolution and investigated the feasibility of the high-resolution PoF camera systems. A PoF camera system with a 0.9-Mpixel video resolution is expected to be feasible with the conventional PoF system.