Implementation of three speckle reduction filters for solid propellant combustion holograms

Abstract

Speckle noise appears when a diffuse light hologram of a particle field is reconstructed with a laser. The speckle must be reduced so that particles of interest may be counted and sized. This thesis describes speckle and a figure of merit known as the speckle index. Three speckle reduction filters suggested by work in the area of synthetic aperture radars were implemented, discussed and compared. An IBM AT personal computer with Itex/PC image processing software was used for the comparison. The geometric filter performed best overall, but may not be superior in every circumstance.