General filtering method for electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe images with various densities based on variational image decomposition

Filtering off speckle noise from a fringe image is one of the key tasks in electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI). In general, ESPI fringe images can be divided into three categories: low-density fringe images, highdensity fringe images, and variable-density fringe images. In this paper, we first present a general filtering method based on variational image decomposition that can filter speckle noise for ESPI fringe images with various densities. In our method, a variable-density ESPI fringe image is decomposed into low-density fringes, high-density fringes, and noise. A low-density fringe image is decomposed into low-density fringes and noise. A high-density fringe image is decomposed into high-density fringes and noise. We give some suitable function spaces to describe low-density fringes, high-density fringes, and noise, respectively. Then we construct several models and numerical algorithms for ESPI fringe images with various densities. And we investigate the performance of these models via our extensive experiments. Finally, we compare our proposed models with the windowed Fourier transform method and coherence enhancing diffusion partial differential equation filter. These two methods may be the most effective filtering methods at present. Furthermore, we use the proposed method to filter a collection of the experimentally obtained ESPI fringe images with poor quality. The experimental results demonstrate the performance of our proposed method. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America