P-35: Characterizing Laser Speckle and Its Effect on Target Detection

Abstract

In this study we examine a power spectral density metric for characterizing laser speckle and predicting its effect on target detection. To evaluate the metric, we measured contrast energy thresholds on both a laser speckle background and backgrounds consisting of randomly modulated pixel luminance (i.e., pixel noise). We found that, at the same power spectral density levels, energy thresholds obtained for gratings superimposed on pixel noise were slightly higher than analogous thresholds obtained with laser-speckle noise. In the discussion section, we outline necessary improvements to the laser speckle power spectral density metric.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2007
Accession Number
ADA495821

Entities

People

  • Chi-feng Tai
  • George A. Geri
  • James P. Gaska

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Bandwidth
  • Coherent Radiation
  • Contrast
  • Detection
  • Diameters
  • Equations
  • Frequency
  • Gaussian Distributions
  • High Resolution
  • Images
  • Luminance
  • Numbers
  • Observers
  • Standards
  • Target Detection

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.
  • Pulsed Power and Plasma Physics.

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy