The smoothing of electronic speckle pattern interferometric images

A simple method of smoothing electronic speckle pattern interferometric images is demonstrated. A new image is created from the original by assuming that the speckles can be modelled as multiplicative noise, and replacing each pixel by the variance of grey level intensities taken over a rectangular window. Results from several window sizes are presented. The amount of smoothing is estimated by inspection of the amount of noise left following the application of a fringe minima detection algorithm to the smoothed image.