Speckle interferometry

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Illumination of a rough surface by a coherent monochromatic wave creates a grainy structure in space termed a speckle pattern. It was considered a special kind of noise and was the bane of holographers. However, its information-carrying property was soon discovered and the phenomenon was used for metrological applications. The realization that a speckle pattern carried information led to a new measurement technique known as speckle interferometry (SI). Although the speckle phenomenon in itself is a consequence of interference among numerous randomly dephased waves, a reference wave is required in SI. Further, it employs an imaging geometry. Initially SI was performed mostly by using silver emulsions as the recording media. The double-exposure specklegram was filtered to extract the desired information. Since SI can be configured so as to be sensitive to the in-plane displacement component, the out-of-plane displacement component or their derivatives, the interferograms corresponding to these were extracted from the specklegram for further analysis. Since the speckle size can be controlled by the F number of the imaging lens, it was soon realized that SI could be performed with electronic detection, thereby increasing its accuracy and speed of measurement. Furthermore, a phase-shifting technique can also be incorporated. This technique came to be known as electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI). It employed the same experimental configurations as SI. ESPI found many industrial applications as it supplements holographic interferometry. We present three examples covering diverse areas. In one application it has been used to measure residual stress in a blank recordable compact disk. In another application, microscopic ESPI has been used to study the influence of relative humidity on paint-coated figurines and also the effect of a conservation agent applied on top of this. The final application is to find the defects in pipes. These diverse applications demonstrate the power of this technique.