Abstract

The statistics of laser-speckle patterns in a plane some distance from a coherently illuminated object are considered in more-general terms than previously. The results obtained show that the rms irradiance is equal to the mean. The irradiance spectrum consists of two terms of equal energy. Assuming that the angular size of the object is much less than the surface roughness diffraction angle, we find that the irradiance autocorrelation function separates into a product of object irradiance and surface-roughness terms. The spectrum separates into the sum of low- and high-frequency contributions. Previous calculations are shown to be special cases or consistent with the present analysis.

© 1975 Optical Society of America

Image speckle patterns of weak diffusers

M. J. Lahart and A. S. Marathay
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 65(7) 769-778 (1975)

Speckle-pattern intensity and phase: Second-order conditional statistics

Silvano Donati and Giuseppe Martini
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 69(12) 1690-1694 (1979)

Image information by means of speckle-pattern processing*

Paul H. Deitz
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 65(3) 279-285 (1975)

Diffraction theory of optical scintillations due to turbulent layers

Leonard S. Taylor and Charles J. Infosino
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 65(1) 78-84 (1975)

Thermal self-focusing of TEM₀₁ laser beams and ring-shape self-focusing of two specific mixtures of modes*

M. S. Sodha and V. P. Nayyar
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 65(9) 1027-1030 (1975)