Biospeckle signal descriptors: a performance comparison

Abstract: The characterization of dynamic phenomena using laser speckle has been studied in several applications and many descriptors have been developed to analyze the resulting images. In this work we compare the performance of a set of dynamic speckle descriptors by applying them to carefully controlled numerical simulations in order to explore their linearity, robustness, sensitivity related to the samples quantity, as well as also by their computing time. Results are shown as plots together with discussions about the corresponding advantages and shortcomings. Also the robustness to inhomogeneous spatial intensity was evaluated in an experiment performed with the illuminated surface of an actual biological object Keywords: biospeckle, dynamic speckle simulation, statistical descriptors, frequency descriptors, temporal descriptors