SPECKLE NOISE-REDUCTION IN TELEVISION HOLOGRAPHY FRINGES USING WAVELET THRESHOLDING

Recently, a novel wavelet method to reduce speckle noise in synthetic aperture radar images was presented. The method, based on the threshol ding of the wavelet coefficients of the transformed image, is computat ionally efficient and maintains sharp image features. The application of a similar method is explored to reduce speckle noise in TV holograp hy fringes, which is a very important problem in the quantitative anal ysis of transient phenomena. Several thresholding approaches are used to test the noise reduction algorithm on computer-simulated fringes an d results are assessed through the evaluation of two comparative param eters: the image fidelity and the speckle index. It is shown that the method achieves the highest speckle reduction when speckle grains have the same average size of the image pixels.