Real-time speckle image processing

The laser dynamic speckle is an optical phenomenon produced when a laser light is reflected from an illuminated surface undergoing some kind of activity. It allows a non-destructive process for the detection of activities that are not easily observable, such as seed viability, paint drying, bacterial activities, corrosion processes, food decomposition, fruit bruising, etc. The analysis of these processes in real time makes it possible to develop important practical applications of commercial, biological and technological interest. This paper presents a new digital system based on granular computing algorithms to characterize speckle dynamics within the time domain. The selected platform to evaluate the system is Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. The obtained minimum clock periods and latencies enable speckle image processing with real-time constraints with a maximum throughput of about thousand 512 × 512 fps.