Basic physical principles of defocused speckle photography: a tilt topology inspection technique

This paper describes the basic physical principles of defocused speckle photography, and how tilt (differential) topology variations on a scatter surface may be separated from linear displacements. Several rather special features about the scattering process have been revealed, such as the laser source distance from the scatter surface must be considered as well as the light incidence angle. Also, the surface must be treated as mirror facet discontinuities for linear displacements using ray and intensity analogies, and surface topology must be treated in terms of phase and pathlength changes, and a continuous smooth surface. The complementary relationship between focused speckle photography and defocused (topological) speckle photography is shown using specially developed separation techniques. This demanded a detailed look at the ‘speckle process’. The basic physical principles, together with an appropriate analysis technique for the developed speckle photographs, have enabled very small faults and indentations on engineering structures to be detected and measured.