Abstract: | We report experimental results that show that the far-field correlation function is sensitive to a small local change in rough-surface geometry, where the speckle spatial correlation rather than the sample ensemble average is adopted. The angular cross-correlation function of the far-field speckles scattered by one-dimensional random rough surfaces is measured when a polarized beam of light is incident upon the rough surface from vacuum, where one part of the surface used is a thin dielectric film deposited upon a glass substrate and the other part is identical to the first except for a localized defect. We envisage application of this sensitivity property to inspection of a sample with a defect by means of speckle mapping. |