Discussion on Validity of Hadamard Speckle Contrast Reduction in Coherent Imaging Systems

Hadamard speckle contrast reduction (SCR) is considered to be an effective approach to deal with speckle problems in coherent imaging systems. A Hadamard SCR system is divided into two subsystems, which implement phase patterns projection and reflected waves imaging respectively. The performances of both sub-systems are discussed with numerical simulations and linked to certain parameters so as to give more insights of this approach. For generality, both optical and millimeter wave imaging systems are discussed. To distinguish from former literature based on Fourier optics, the simulation is implemented via wave optics, which is more physical and more accurate. Moreover, considering the fact that the Hadamard method originates from statistics, the effectiveness of Hadamard SCR is in the first place linked to the texture of the object’s surface. Statistical optics is also adopted during qualitative analysis of the results. It is shown that the ratio between the dimension of a resolution cell and the granular size of the object’s randomly rough surface is closely linked to the performance of Hadamard SCR. Differences in the roughness model in imaging cases of optical and millimeter waves are discussed, which would help to evaluate the validity of the Hadamard SCR approach in practice. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the misunderstandings of Hadamard SCR in previous literature and to give a guideline to apply this approach.