Reliability of biospeckle image analysis

 This paper presents an analysis of the time history of speckle patterns (THSP) that is one of the most used procedures to evaluate the biological activity by biospeckle images. THSPs generated by numerical simulations, obtained in a controlled drying of paint experiment and in dead and alive bean seeds under laser illumination were evaluated. We used first- and second-order statistics of the dynamic speckle patterns for different time and spatial amounts of data. We have tested both square and rectangular windows in the space time domain. The results show the agreement with a theoretical curve and comparisons between different window sizes.     

Speckle time evolution characterization by the co-occurrence matrix analysis

We describe some aspects of the measurement of dynamic speckle activity. We propose the use of the co-occurrence matrix of the time history of the intensity of a speckle pattern. Then we suggest a measure of the activity based on the use of one of its second order moments. Some numerical simulations were performed for testing purposes. The method was applied to the study of the drying of paint and was compared with gravimetric measurements. Experimental results obtained are shown and a good correlation is obtained.     

Monitoring of Paint Drying Process by Digital Speckle Correlation

The state of drying paint is monitored from the dynamic behaviors of the speckle pattern arising from laser illumination of the region inspected. Temporal variation of the peak height of the cross-correlation function between successive frames taken with a fixed interval is plotted until the peak maintains a stationary maximum value. We used a speckle pattern in the diffraction field for monitoring of a single region and that in the image field for simultaneous monitoring of various regions. Both the normal and the phase-only algorithms were compared for cross-correlation computation. The former showed more distinct variation of peak height.     

Simulation of dynamic speckle sequences and its application to the analysis of transient processes

Dynamic speckle has been used in recent years to analyse several transient processes that are produced in industrial and biological applications. We present here a numerical simulation to generate a temporal sequence of dynamic speckle patterns which is based on a model used for speckle formation by the superposition of waves from discrete scattering centres. It is demonstrated that the first and second statistics of the intensity of each speckle image, the time history of the speckle pattern, the temporal evolution of the correlation coefficient, and the power spectral density of the intensity generated by the proposed model reproduce quite well those obtained from experimentally recorded data. The process of a fast drying paint is presented as an example of the application of the proposed numerical model.     

白蛋白酸致变性的动态激光散斑研究

利用动态激光散斑的方法研究了白蛋白的酸致变性过程。首先,利用动态散斑理论模拟生成了动态散斑序列图;然后,利用模拟和实验散斑图的时间序列散斑图及其灰度共生矩阵对白蛋白的酸致变性过程进行了分析;接着,又利用灰度共生矩阵的惯性矩和不同阶段的四幅散斑图的平均对比度图对该过程进行了更深入的研究。理论模拟和实验研究结果表明,在白蛋白酸致变性过程中,胶体溶液中的蛋白质微粒的运动由剧烈逐渐变得缓慢;同时,微粒数量减少而微粒尺寸增加。研究表明,动态激光散斑方法是一种实时、快速、有效的研究白蛋白变性过程的新手段。     

Application of laser speckle analysis for the assessment of cementitious surfaces subjected to laser cleaning

This paper focuses on the application of laser speckle technique for the assessment of the effectiveness of laser cleaning of cementitious surfaces. Laser speckle-based methods are non-contact, highly resolving techniques for the measurement of displacement, rotation, and strain of an illuminated area on a rough surface. Since the intensity of reflected light depends on the geometrical microstructure and colour of the samples, any alterations of the surface result in different speckle images. Analysis of speckle images presented here is based on the analysis of the distribution of intensity of reflected light obtained in a selected plane, and analysis of statistical parameters describing such distribution (skewness and kurtosis). A wide range of laser-cleaned mortar samples with different geometrical microstructure and moisture content has been subjected to the assessment by He-Ne laser. Laser speckle method has been successfully used to identify the effectiveness of the laser cleaning process with respect to different surface conditions. It appears that the changes in kurtosis and skewness should be mainly associated with the alterations of geometrical microstructure. Whereas, mean light intensity seemed to depend predominantly on the mortar's absorption characteristics (colour).     

Online biospeckle assessment without loss of definition and resolution by motion history image

The application of the dynamic laser speckle as a reliable instrument to achieve maps of activity in biological material is available in literature optics and laser. The application, particularly in live specimens, such as animals and human beings necessitated some approaches to avoid the kinking of the bodies, which creates changes in the patterns undermining the biological activity under monitoring. The adoption of online techniques circumvented the noise generated by the kinking, however, with considerable reduction in the resolution and definition of the activity maps. This work presents a feasible alternative to the routine online methods based on the Motion History Image (MHI) methodology. The adoption of MHI was tested in biological and non-biological samples and compared with online as well as offline procedures of biospeckle image analysis. Tests on paint drying was associated to alcohol volatilization, and tests on a maize seed and on growing of roots confirmed the hypothesis that the MHI would be able to implement an online approach without the reduction of resolution and definition on the resultant images, thereby presenting in some cases results that were comparable to the offline procedures.     

激光散斑的亚像素位移法计算及比较

根据激光散斑相关测量中采用的插值法、梯度算法和牛顿一拉夫森迭代法3种亚像素位移算法的特点,逐一在亚像素尺度计算出磁流体干燥过程中的同一激光散斑图的偏均值和标准差变化曲线。基于得到的偏差均值和标准差讨论了3种算法处理激光散斑图的特点,比较了3种算法处理散斑图的计算精度、稳定性和计算用时。结果显示,在小变形的亚像素位移测量时,梯度算法的精度较高,且较为稳定,计算效率也较牛顿一拉夫森算法快约9倍。因此,在进行小变形亚像素位移测量时,采用梯度算法计算激光散斑是有效的。     

Velocity and density field measurements by digital speckle method

Velocity and density field measurements based on image processing of laser speckle or pseudo-speckle pattern have been developed. Laser speckle velocimetry (LSV) or white-light speckle velocimetry (WSV), which corresponds to a high-image-density PIV, gives a local velocity vector map or whole field velocity contour map of a two-dimensional flow field seeded densely with fine particles. This technique has an advantage in high-speed flow measurement without limit of frame rate except for directional ambiguity. New techniques of laser speckle photography and laser speckle interferometry by means of digital image processing have been developed recently for density field measurements. In laser speckle photography, a local density gradient vector map is reconstructed by cross-correlation evaluation between the reference and the object speckle patterns. In laser speckle interferometry, an equi-density contour map is reconstructed by image subtraction between the reference and the object interferometric speckle patterns.     

Applications of laser speckle photography for thermal flow problems

Laser speckle photography measures projected beam deflection of a phase object. The beam deflection measured at the solid surface will directly determine the wall-temperature gradient. Thus, the laser-speckle photography allows the evaluation of the convection-heat-transfer coefficients without the need to correct for conduction and radiation heat losses, which otherwise would be necessary. Selected results and brief discussions are presented for several natural convection-heat-transfer problems. Second, high-temperature applications of laser speckle photography shows potential as a nonintrusive means of measuring flame temperature. A fairly good agreement is shown in comparison of the laser speckle data with intrusive thermocouple data. Suggestive discussions are made to further improve the accuracy and sensitivity of the laser speckle photography technique in high-temperature applications. Finally, tomographic reconstruction of laser speckle photography data is discussed using both actual test fields and computer-synthesized phantom fields. The conventional algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) has been modified to apply for the laser speckle tomography. The efficacy of ART is examined particularly under a limited number of projections.     

激光显示中消散斑方案研究

激光显示消散斑问题是激光显示的重要研究课题,是阻碍激光显示真正实用化的一个关键难题。综述了国内外已有的消散斑方案的优劣以及可行性,并重点分析了双屏幕振动消散斑方案。在此基础上,提出了新的三种理论消散癍方案：铁电液晶消散斑,波导扰动光纤消散斑和旋转散射片消散斑。     

Robust technique of analyzing and locating laser speckle patterns for optical computer mice

Laser speckles have been used in measurement techniques, since they were discovered to be correlated with the displacement of the light source. This paper presents a robust technique of analyzing and locating laser speckle patterns (LSPs) for a prototype of a laser optical mouse. After the speckle images are captured from the image-grabbing device, they are analyzed by the proposed image processing procedures and normalized cross-correlation (NCC) is adopted to develop position-locating rules for laser speckle patterns. To verify robustness of the proposed approach, nine different materials of mouse pad are used. Experimental results show that they have all achieved similar and promising performance. Therefore, the proposed technique can not only precisely calculate the moving directions and displacement information for laser speckles, the linearity for the prototype of laser mouse can also be verified.     

Bio-speckle assessment of bruising in fruits

The dynamic speckle patterns or bio-speckle is a phenomenon produced by laser illumination of active materials, such as a biological tissue. Fruits, even hard peel ones, show a speckle activity that can be related to maturity, turgor, damage, aging, and mechanical properties. In this case, we suggest a bio-speckle technique as a potential methodology for the study of impact on apples and the analysis of bruises produced by them. The aim is to correlate physical properties of apples with quality factors using a non-contact and non-invasive technique.     

Evaluation of activity through dynamic laser speckle using the absolute value of the differences

When a material is illuminated with a laser beam, it is possible to verify a phenomenon known as dynamic speckle or biospeckle. It exhibits an interference image that contains lots of information about the process being analyzed, and one of its most important applications is determining the activity quantity from the materials under study. The numerical analysis of the dynamic speckle images can be carried out by means of a co-occurrence matrix (COM) that assembles the intensity distributions of a speckle pattern with regard to time. An operational method that is widely used on the biospeckle COMs is the inertia moment (IM). Some studies demonstrate that IM is more sensitive on analyzing processes that involve high activities or high frequencies if considering the spectral analysis of the phenomena. However, when this variation is not so intense, this method is less efficient. For low variations on the activity or low frequencies, qualitative methods such as wavelet based entropy and cross-spectrum analysis have presented better results; however, processes that are in the intermediate range of activity are not well covered for any of these techniques mentioned earlier. The contribution of this research is to present an alternative approach, based on the absolute value of the differences (AVD) when handling the biospeckle COM. By using AVD on the seed-drying process, was found that it is efficient on verifying the behavior of the intermediate frequencies. Accumulated sum test (Coates and Diggle) showed that AVD and IM are generated from the same stochastic process. Thus, AVD is useful as an alternative method in some cases or even as a complementary tool for analyzing the dynamic speckle, mainly when the information of the activity is not present on high frequencies.     

Evaluation of dynamic speckle activity using the empirical mode decomposition method

The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method is used to process sequences of dynamic speckle patterns to segment the differential activity that presents a sample as a function of the spatial coordinates and time. The application of the method is illustrated by segmenting bruised regions in fruits. A discussion of the obtained results and a comparison with the use of the filter bank technique are also presented.     

利用散斑空一时相关性测散射体的慢运动

本文研究了利用远场动态散斑的空-时相关性测量散射体运动速度矢量的理论和实验技术.作者在推导出远场动态散斑空-时相关函数的基础上,提出并建立了一种新的微机辅助检测系统.利用它从实验上证明了在单高斯光照明、散射体平动情况下运场动态散斑的空-时相关性,以及空-时相关的差分与运动速度之间的线性关系.通过测量动态散斑的空-时相关性获取散射体的运动速度矢量.实验结果与理论分析吻合.     

Flow visualization and density measurement of compressible flows by a laser speckle method

Laser speckle method is a well known technique that is useful for both visualization and quantitative measurement. This technique was applied to the density measurement of Mach reflection of shock waves in the present experiment. The Object of the measurement is the density field of simple Mach reflection in relatively low shock Mach number. The non-uniform flow field is divided into three regions by incident, Mach and reflected shock waves. A shock tube was employed in the present experiment. Wedges of 20 degrees and 45 degrees were placed in the test section. YAG laser was employed as a light source. Speckle photograph was taken by a digital still camera. Simple subtraction between the reference and flow images shows a shock pattern and a degree of the correlation of speckle pattern in the flow field. Thus, we can obtain a visualized flow image showing a configuration of Mach reflection from speckle photograph. Speckle photographs which was obtained in the experiments were processed with cross-correlation method. A reconstructed density gradient vector map of Mach reflection was obtained. Comparing the experimental result with numerical one, the measured density gradient shows a good agreement with theoretical prediction.     

Numerical Simulations and Analysis of Mechanisms of Paint Removal with a Pulsed Laser

Journal of Russian Laser Research - To study the process of removing acrylic polyurethane paint from a 2024 aluminum alloy surface with a pulsed laser, we establish a finite-element model via...     

Evaluation of photographic emulsions using speckle patterns

This communication reports the observation of a typical set of fringes in transmission, when a wet processed photographic plate, exposed to laser speckles and kept tilted with respect to normal, isscanned by a thin laser beam. A possible explanation for the fringe formation is given which is based on the speckle stretching due to swelling of the emulsion. A method has been proposed to estimate emulsion swelling due to wet processing and the rate of its shrinkage during subsequent drying process. Experimental results are presented for Kodak 649-F spectroscopic plates.     

Monitoring of drying process and cracking/disbonding of paints using lensless Fourier transform digital holography

We have proposed and demonstrated a new application of lensless Fourier transform digital holographic interferometry to study/monitor the drying process and detection of cracking/disbonding of the painted surface by observing the dynamics of interference phase maps. The technique can monitor the rate of drying of paint and visualize the state of dryness and crack/disbond. The technique is simple and easy to implement.