Measurements of axial displacements undergone by a diffusing object in speckle photography

Abstract

The speckles of the image plane of an object are both radially shifted and decorrelated when the object is axially translated through an amount ϵ. We demonstrate that this radial shift, which is related to the position of the pupil of the optical system, disappears when the pupil lies in the back focal plane of the imaging lens. However, if the irradiance of the image plane is twice recorded on a photographic plate which is laterally shifted through ζ H between the exposures, the minimum value of the contrast of the Fourier fringes exhibited by the plate after processing, gives the value of ϵ if ϵ is less than a particular value, ϵ M which will be defined. Also we propose a new speckle measurement method in which the fringes are automatically removed when ϵ is greater than ϵ M. We record the image of the object illuminated in convergent light through an amplitude diffuser placed in the Fourier plane of the object. The mean speckle speckle size of the diffuser is equal to the mean size of the speckles generated by the object in its Fourier plane.