Abstract: An endoscope for image acquisition via illumination of an object's image, such as but not limited to a bar code, by a set of spatially resolved patterns, with subsequent reconstruction of the image without detailed spatial resolution. A device to stabilize the prescribed set of illuminating patterns against bending of the fiber is also disclosed, which consists of the auxiliary pre-bent part of the fiber and the work part of the fiber, subject to the inevitable bends with or without additional compensation. The distorting influence of the bending of the work part is compensated by the controllable loosening of the pre-bent part of the fiber. Encoding of the pixels of the image or of the illumination patterns encodes the intensity of each pixel to the excitation intensity of the corresponding mode. Such encoding is stable to the bending of the guide.