Evaluation of a correlation phase recovery method to be used in temporal speckle pattern interferometry with noise contaminated specklegrams

Abstract

When a phase distribution is evaluated in temporal speckle pattern interferometry, the accuracy of the retrieved phase distribution depends on how the different phase recovery methods deal with the influence of low-frequency noise and intensity bias. In this paper, we show that the proposed correlation method can effectively recover the phase distribution in time series of speckle interferograms that are affected by sets of adjacent non-modulated pixels, combined with very small phase changes between successive frames. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed when the retrieved optical phase distributions are coded in noisy temporal speckle pattern interferometry signals presenting large regions of adjacent low-modulated pixels. It is also compared with the data measured with the well-known one-dimensional Fourier transform technique, and the three-dimensional directional wavelet transform method. The performance of the proposed phase retrieval technique is compared with these last two methods using computer-simulated speckle interferograms, and the advantages and limitations of the proposed method are discussed. Finally, the performance of the proposed correlation technique to process real data is illustrated.