Noise reduction in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringes by merging orthogonally polarised speckle fields

The noise in sawtooth fringes generated by electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) is investigated. When deformations of depolarising objects are studied, the scattered object light can be decomposed into two orthogonal linearly polarised speckle patterns which are partially decorrelated. Their correlation coefficient decreases with increasing depolarisation coefficient of the object. By suitable merging of the phase distributions of these two speckle fields on the basis of a modulation depth analysis, the rms phase error in the ESPI sawtooth fringes can be reduced significantly.