The empirical mode decomposition: a must-have tool in speckle interferometry?

In a wider and wider range of research and engineering activities, there is a growing interest for full-field techniques, featuring nanometric sensitivities, and able to be addressed to dynamic behaviors characterization. Speckle interferometry (SI) techniques are acknowledged as good candidates to tackle this challenge. To get rid of the intrinsic correlation length limitation and simplify the unwrapping step, a straightforward approach lies in the pixel history analysis. The need of increasing performances in terms of accuracy and computation speed is permanently demanding new efficient processing techniques. We propose in this paper a fast implementation of the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) to put the SI pixel signal in an appropriate shape for accurate phase computation. As one of the best way to perform it, the analytic method based on the Hilbert transform (HT) of the so-transformed signal will then be reviewed. For short evaluation, a zero-crossing technique which exploits directly the extrema finding step of the EMD will be presented. We propose moreover a technique to discard the under-modulated pixels which yield wrong phase evaluation. This work is actually an attempt to elaborate a phase extraction procedure which exploits all the reliable information in 3D,-two space and one time coordinates-, to endeavor to make the most of SI raw data. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America