Effect of the average number of reference speckles in speckle imaging using off-axis speckle holography

The propagation of a coherent beam of light through a random scattering medium results in the generation of a speckle pattern. Although the intensity distribution of the speckle pattern is random in nature, the information of the object hidden behind a scattering medium is scrambled into it. The scrambled object information can be retrieved using the off-axis speckle holographic technique, where the object retrieval is made from a recorded interferogram, formed by the superposition of the object speckles and a tilted reference speckle pattern. In the present paper, the effect of the average number of reference speckles on the signal-to-noise ratio of the retrieved object is investigated in two different random domains of the reference speckles, which are defined from the study of the Shannon entropy of the reference speckle patterns. The observed results can be useful in tuning the visibility and sharpness of the object, retrieved by employing the off-axis speckle holographic technique. (c) 2019 Optical Society of America