IntroductionThe presence of the multiplicative speckle noise, intrinsic to Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry (ESPI), limits the quality of ESPI measurements. Of many algorithms proposed to reduce the speckle noise in the image, only few recognize the statistical properties of the speckle noise and the multiplicative relation between the underlying cosinusoidal pattern and the speckle interferogram. Local averaging is a limited approach because of the possibly very high differences between the adjacent pixels in relation to the mean signal value, which corresponds to particularly low signal to noise ratio. In this paper we test an approach based on the non-local means algorithm, which is a global weighted averaging scheme based on the pixels neighborhoods (patches) similarity criterion.
Speckle Fringe Pattern Mathematical ModelA detailed probablistic model of the speckle image formation can be found in [1]. It can be rigorously shown, that the speckle optical field amplitude a(x) obeys the Rayleigh distribution, Eq. (1), while phase ϕ(x) obeys the uniform distribution .This implies that the intensity of the speckle pattern obeys the negative exponential distribution. We consider the case in which correlation length is smaller than the resolution of optical system, i.e., there is no correlation between the registered intensities in adjacent pixels. A rather simple way to model the correlation speckle fringe pattern of adequate statistical properties is to calculate the random complex optical field A 1 (x) of given probabilistic distribution and then produce the similar pattern A 2 (x) but with phase component modified by the known function δ(x) ,