In laser projection systems the observer in the far field of the image points on the screen will recognize serious speckle noise There are many methods to reduce or eliminate speckles in the near field by reducing or eliminating temporal or spatial coherence of the laser But for the far field it is hardly possible to change the coherence properties of laser sources so that speckles will disappear We propose a new method for eliminating speckles in the far field by using a diffractive optical element The intensity modulation depth in the far-field speckle pattern can be reduced to a few percent while good beam quality is preserved

Speckle Reduction in Laser Projection Systems by Diffractive Optical Elements

The occurrence and smoothing of speckle are studied as a function of the line width for a highly collimated illuminating source. A general theory is presented for speckling in the image of a partially diffuse, phase type of object, which has a variable number of random scattering centers per resolution element. Then, an expression is derived for the wavelength spacing required to decouple the speckle patterns arising from two monochromatic tones in an imaging system, thereby establishing that it is feasible to smooth speckle using multicolor illumination. This theory is verified in a series of experiments using both laser illumination and band-limited light from a carbon arc. With highly collimated sources, we show that speckle appears laserlike for an imaged diffuser even up to line widths of 5 A. Then, smoothing of speckle is demonstrated in the imaging of a diffuser and for a section of an optic nerve when the illumination is provided by six narrow lines spread over 1500 A. Since with color-blind, panchromatic viewing the speckle smooths, a direct extension of this method to holographic microscopy, using a multitone laser, should permit one to record and reconstruct holograms of diffraction-limited resolution that are essentially speckle-free.

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Speckle Reduction Using Multiple Tones of Illumination

Images of cone photoreceptors in the living human eye

The condition for a diffuser to produce the maximum speckle contrast reduction with the minimum number of distinct phase patterns is derived. A binary realization of this optimum diffuser is obtained by mapping the rows or columns of a Hadamard matrix to the phase patterns. The method is experimentally verified in the Grating Light Valve laser projection display.

Hadamard speckle contrast reduction

Many optical measurement techniques provide fringe patterns as their results. The decodification processes that employ one or several fringe patterns to automatically retrieve the phase are generally designated as phase-evaluation methods. In this work, an overview of these methods will be schematically presented. Their particular performances will be compared, stressing their main advantages and drawbacks. An important group of these methods employs the well-known phase-shifting algorithms as a tool for calculating the phase. In the general form of these algorithms, the principal value of the optical phase is computed by an inverse trigonometric function whose argument is a combination of phase-shifted intensity values, provided by the modulation of one or several fringe patterns. These algorithms will be also studied in the general context of the phase-evaluation methods.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0957-0233/10/3/005/pdf

Phase-evaluation methods in whole-field optical measurement techniques

A moving diffuser destroys the spatial coherence of laser light only partially when the integration time is finite; this can be expressed by the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio in the observed illuminance, due to the residual speckle. The method can be improved by the use of a two-diffuser system of which one diffuser is motionless, the other moving. In this case, the integration time (or the displacement of the diffuser) required to obtain a given S/N ratio can be greatly reduced, allowing the use of a slowly moving diffuser. Moreover, the S/N ratio does not depend on the optical-system parameters, whereas it depends on these parameters when a single diffuser is used.

Denis Joyeux

Papers

Speckle Removal by a Slowly Moving Diffuser Associated with a Motionless Diffuser