Speckle Fringe Patterns Research Articles

A Vision-Based Bolt Looseness Detection Method for a Multi-Bolt Connection

Many vision-based bolt looseness detection methods that directly observe the bolts have been developed. However, these methods have many limitations in terms of the conditions and processes of their implementation. To address these problems, this paper proposed a fully automated vision-based bolt looseness detection method for a rigid multi-bolt connection. The proposed method combines digital shearing speckle pattern interferometry (DSSPI) and recurrent neural network (RNN) and involves capturing speckle fringe patterns under various looseness cases using the DSSPI system and classifying these patterns with an RNN model to detect the loose bolts. The proposed method can detect all the bolts within the measured surface at one time, which is efficient. On the other hand, it eliminates the need for prior information such as the initial angle and position of each bolt. It can even detect unseen bolts in multi-bolt connections, making it applicable for connections in complex structures in which occlusion often occurs. Additionally, the method eliminates the complex process of distortion rectification. These features make the method achieve a single-judgment time (four bolts at one detection) of only 4.70 millisecond with a detection accuracy over 99%, which has potential for the real-time detection of loose bolts in multi-bolt connections.

Speckle-noise filtering based on non-local mean sparse principal component analysis method

Speckle-noise filtering is an extensive and key process in coherent interferometric techniques to obtain important and accurate information from the recorded interferogram or fringe pattern. The speckle-noise inherent to these interferograms, recorded by digital image sensors in these optical techniques, is eliminated by an appropriate image processing method. Since the beginning and further development of these techniques, a wide variety of speckle noise filtering methods and techniques have been proposed. The present research work aims to exploit the performance of the non-local sparse principal component analysis (NLS-PCA) method for speckle noise reduction as applied to the interferometric fringe patterns obtained from digital holographic and digital speckle pattern interferometric techniques. The performance of the NLS-PCA is evaluated on numerical simulations using different types of speckle fringe patterns resulting in the method being highly effective in filtering the speckle noise and providing superior results evaluated in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), Edge preservation Index (EPI), and Equivalent Number of look (ENL), in comparison to widely known methods such as windowed Fourier transform method, Lee filter, Weiner filter. Furthermore, the proposed method maintains the finer details and preserves the fringe edges effectively. The performance of the NLS-PCA method is also demonstrated on experimental speckle fringe patterns and digital holograms.

Sign-singularity solution in single-frame speckle interferometry with vortex-phase modulation

We propose a sign-singularity solution in single-shot digital speckle interferometry based on vortex-phase modulation. The vortex phase is introduced through the reference beam as variation information by a reflective liquid crystal spatial light modulator. The sign singularity is eliminated with the help of a single spiral speckle fringe pattern. To effectively obtain the deformation phase, the measurement process is specially designed on the consideration of the modulation principle of the vortex phase, which is discussed in terms of theoretical analysis and simulation results. Experiments on out-of-plane deformation measurement reveal the feasibility of the proposed method and suggest the potential in actual dynamic measurement applications.

Wavelets Teager–Kaiser Hilbert approach for AM–FM signal demodulation: application in the field of speckle metrology

In this work, we propose a combination of the Teager–Kaiser energy operator (TKEO) and the spiral phase transform (SPT) for robust instant energy estimation of amplitude-modulated and frequency-modulated (AM–FM) signals, where the energy extraction is followed by a high-frequency component, generally considered as noise. We demonstrate that this noise component can be subtracted mathematically using the SPT transformation applied to the AM–FM signal. The improvement in demodulation is tested using a simulated AM–FM image and evaluated by the image quality index. An experimental speckle fringe pattern obtained by digital speckle pattern interferometry on a hard disk is denoised using a multiband approach and demodulated using the proposed method.

Contribution study of monogenic wavelets transform to reduce speckle noise in digital speckle pattern interferometry

Wavelets shrinkage is the most illustrative of wavelets transform for speckle noise reduction. We aim to study the performance of a monogenic wavelet transform to reduce the speckle noise in digital speckle pattern interferometric fringes. The proposed method is implemented on simulated and experimental speckle fringe patterns and its performance is appraised on the basis of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and quality index (Q). The ability to reduce the speckle noise by the proposed method is compared with other classical speckle denoising methods. The obtained results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method for speckle noise reduction in speckle fringes in terms of PSNR and Q. It is also observed that the method provides better qualitative and quantitative results. Furthermore, the proposed method preserves the edge information of the speckle fringes, a feature that is quantified by the edge preservation index.

Investigation on Vibration Response of Aluminum Foam Beams Using Speckle Interferometry

This paper firstly presents a brief review on the representations of speckle fringe pattern in vibration measurement using time-averaged electronic speckle pattern interference (ESPI) method. Based on laser phase noise, a new representation of speckle fringe intensity generated by real-time subtraction ESPI method for vibrating measurement is then proposed. In the experimental performance, the real-time subtraction ESPI method is employed to inspect the vibrating response of a closed-cell aluminum foam cantilever beam. In contract with the results of the finite elemental method simulation, the vibration mode shapes obtained by the ESPI method are well agreed with numerical prediction. The optical vibration analysis is also carried out to determine the effective Young’s modulus of aluminum foam, and the results verify the validation of the ESPI method for investigation on mechanical properties of metal foam materials.

Synchronous triple-optical-path digital speckle pattern interferometry with fast discrete curvelet transform for measuring three-dimensional displacements

Digital speckle pattern interferometry (DSPI) is a well-established and widely used optical measurement technique for obtaining qualitative as well as quantitative measurements of objects deformation. The simultaneous measurement of an object's surface displacements in three dimensions using DSPI is of great interest. This paper presents a triple-optical-path DSPI based method for the simultaneous and independent measurement of three-dimensional (3D) displacement fields. In the proposed method, in-plane speckle interferometers with dual-observation geometry and an out-of-plane interferometer are optimally combined to construct an integrated triple-optical-path DSPI system employing the phase shift technique, which uses only a single laser source and three cameras. These cameras are placed along a single line to synchronously capture real-time visible speckle fringe patterns in three dimensions. In addition, a pre-filtering method based on the fast discrete curvelet transform (FDCT) is utilized for denoising the obtained wrapped phase patterns to improve measurement accuracy. Finally, the simultaneous measurement of the 3D displacement fields of a simple beam and a composite laminated plate respectively subjected to three-point and single-point bend loading are investigated to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Denoising in digital speckle pattern interferometry using fast discrete curvelet transform

In digital speckle pattern interferometry, the denoising of speckle fringe patterns is of vital importance for quantitative extraction of phase distribution. A filtering method of fast discrete curvelet transform based on weighted average thresholding technique is proposed in this paper for noise removal in speckle fringe patterns. Both computer-simulated and experimental digital speckle pattern interferometry fringe patterns are adopted to evaluate the performance of the proposed filtering method. In addition, a widely used and representative filtering method, windowed Fourier filter, is introduced for making a comparison and validation in the image processing effect, and the parameter of peak signal noise ratio is also used for assessment of denoising effect. It is shown from the filtered results that the filtering method of fast discrete curvelet transform is effecitve to remove speckle noises and simultaneously preserve fringe structure information.

Micro-Displacement, Stain and Stress Measurement Based on Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry

A micro-displacement, strain and stress measurement method based on electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) technique is proposed, and the measuring device is designed. Two symmetric laser beams are illuminated on the optical rough surface of a steel cantilever beam, and then speckle images are photographed by CCD. A series of filtering processing is carried out for subtracted images and FEM analysis is performed. Using the speckle fringe patterns finally achieved, displacement, strain and stress can be calculated. By comparing displacement, strain and stress measured by this method with simulation results, feasibility and engineering application value of this method have been proved.

Application of two oriented partial differential equation filtering models on speckle fringes with poor quality and their numerically fast algorithms

In this paper, we are concerned with denoising in experimentally obtained electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) speckle fringe patterns with poor quality. We extend the application of two existing oriented partial differential equation (PDE) filters, including the second-order single oriented PDE filter and the double oriented PDE filter, to two experimentally obtained ESPI speckle fringe patterns with very poor quality, and compare them with other efficient filtering methods, including the adaptive weighted filter, the improved nonlinear complex diffusion PDE, and the windowed Fourier transform method. All of the five filters have been illustrated to be efficient denoising methods through previous comparative analyses in published papers. The experimental results have demonstrated that the two oriented PDE models are applicable to low-quality ESPI speckle fringe patterns. Then for solving the main shortcoming of the two oriented PDE models, we develop the numerically fast algorithms based on Gauss-Seidel strategy for the two oriented PDE models. The proposed numerical algorithms are capable of accelerating the convergence greatly, and perform significantly better in terms of computational efficiency. Our numerically fast algorithms are extended automatically to some other PDE filtering models.

New fourth-order partial differential equations for filtering in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringes

Partial differential equations (PDEs) based methods have been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for filtering in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe or wrapped phase patterns. In this paper, we derive the new fourth-order partial differential equations (NFOPDE) with a better performance for filtering in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe patterns based on the variational methods. We test the proposed models on two computer-simulated speckle fringe patterns and an experimentally obtained fringe pattern, respectively, and compare our models with the widely used, well-known the second-order selective degenerate diffusion PDE model (SOSDPDE) and the published fourth-order PDE model (PFOPDE). The proposed NFOPDE can overcome the shortages that both the SOSDPDE and PFOPDE encounter. In all cases, our NFOPDE outperforms SOSDPDE and PFOPDE.

A novel method to obtain electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe patterns with high contrast

Traditional speckle fringe patterns of electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) are obtained by adding, subtracting, or multiplying the speckle patterns recorded before and after the deformation. However, these speckle fringe patterns are of limited visibility, especially for addition and multiplication fringe patterns. We propose a novel method to obtain speckle fringe patterns of ESPI from undeformed and deformed speckle patterns. The fringe pattern generated by our method is of high contrast and has better quality than subtraction fringe. The new method is simple and does not require more computational effort. The proposed method is tested on the experimentally obtained undeformed and deformed speckle patterns. The experimental results illustrate the performance of this approach.

Phase retrieval of speckle fringe pattern with carriers using 2D wavelet transform

A novel two-dimensional (2D) Gabor continuous wavelet transform (CWT) for phase retrieval and fringe filtering of speckle fringe patterns with spatial carriers is proposed. Theoretical analysis of 2D Gabor CWT is presented and results are compared with advanced fan 2D CWT using both the computer simulated and experimental speckle fringe patterns. It is shown that noise reduction by 2D Gabor CWT demonstrates better results than that of the advanced fan 2D CWT. Two-dimensional Gabor CWT is also compared with 2D Fourier transform and results show that 2D Gabor CWT algorithm has better noise immunity.

电子散斑干涉条纹图的变分去噪方法

Traditional speckle fringe patterns by electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) are inherently noisy and of limited visibility, so denoising is the key problem in ESPI. We present the variational denoising method for ESPI. This method transforms the image denosing to minimizing an appropriate penalized energy function and solving a partial differential equation. We test the proposed method on computer-simulated and experimental speckle correlation fringes, respectively. The results show that this technique is capable of significantly improving the quality of fringe patterns. It works well as a pre-processing for the fringe patterns by ESPI.

热传导方程在散斑条纹图相位提取中的应用

热传导方程在散斑条纹图相位提取中的应用

Performance evaluation of partial differential equation models in electronic speckle pattern interferometry and the δ-mollification phase map method

The ordinary differential equation (ODE) and partial differential equation (PDE) image- processing methods have been applied to reduce noise and enhance the contrast of electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe patterns. We evaluate the performance of a few representative PDE denoising models quantitatively with two parameters called image fidelity and speckle index, and then we choose a good denoising model. Combining this denoising model with the ODE enhancement method, we make it possible to perform contrast enhancement and denoising simultaneously. Second, we introduce the delta-mollification method to smooth the unwrapped phase map. Finally, based on PDE image processing, delta mollification and some traditional techniques, an approach of phase extraction from a single fringe pattern is tested for computer-simulated and experimentally obtained fringe patterns. The method works well under a high noise level and limited visibility and can extract accurate phase values.

Contrast enhancement for electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringes by the differential equation enhancement method

Electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe patterns usually have poor contrast so it is important to enhance fringe contrast for the extraction of phase from a single fringe pattern. We present new enhancement methods based on differential equations (called DE enhancement methods) to electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringes. The DE enhancement methods transform the image processing to solve differential equations. With the proposed methods, the visibility of the correlation speckle fringe patterns can be improved significantly. We tested the proposed methods on computer-simulated speckle correlation fringes and experimentally obtained fringes, and we compared the new method with other contrast enhancement techniques. The experimental results illustrate the performance of this approach.

Effect of image fiber on the speckle fringe pattern in image fiber-guided DSPI endoscopy

The effect of using an image fiber on the speckle fringe visibility in an endoscopic DSPI is analyzed here. An endoscope system was designed and developed, using image fiber as the speckle pattern image conduit, to work in the out-of-plane speckle interferometric configuration and experiments were carried out using a curved phantom tissue specimen as the test target. Experimental results obtained using the developed system are compared with that obtained using conventional DSPI system. To obtain a relative and quantitative comparison of the quality of the fringes obtained employing the two methods, an evaluation method that can give a quantified ‘ score’ is proposed here.

Data compression for speckle correlation interferometry temporal fringe pattern analysis

Temporal fringe pattern analysis is gaining prominence in speckle correlation interferometry, in particular for transient phenomena studies. This form of analysis, nevertheless, necessitates large data storage. Current compression schemes do not facilitate efficient data retrieval and may even result in important data loss. We describe a novel compression scheme that does not result in crucial data loss and allows for the efficient retrieval of data for temporal fringe analysis. In sample tests with digital speckle interferometry on fringe patterns of a plate and of a cantilever beam subjected to temporal phase and load evolution, respectively, we achieved a compression ratio of 1.6 without filtering out any data from discontinuous and low fringe modulation spatial points. By eliminating 38% of the data from discontinuous and low fringe modulation spatial points, we attained a significant compression ratio of 2.4.

Speckle correlation fringes denoising using stationary wavelet transform. Application in the wavelet phase evaluation technique

This paper presents a stationary wavelet transform (SWT) method for speckle noise reduction in digital speckle pattern interferometry fringes. The main advantage of SWT is its translation invariance, which makes it important in statistical image processing applications. This method was used to denoise a simulated speckle fringe patterns, a good fidelity value was obtained. Applied to the wavelet phase evaluation, it has provided a phase distribution with a good accuracy.