W-band quasi-optical speckle contrast measurements with a Hadamard diffuser”, Society of Photo-optical Instruments (SPIE), Vol. 6341, pp-U19-U24 , 2006
 
W-band quasi-optical speckle contrast measurements with a Hadamard diffuser”, Society of Photo-optical Instruments (SPIE), Vol. 6341, pp-U19-U24 , 2006 
 
Saiful Islam, Irina Jager, Gaetan Koers, Roger Vounckx
 
Abstract 

Millimeter waves are able to penetrate materials that are usually opaque to both visible and infrared radiation. We used this advantage to design a free-space active millimeter-wave imaging set up for security applications. Because all existing mm-wave sources are coherent - speckle is one of the ultimate limiting factors of the imaging techniques. This problem is of special importance for mm-wave imaging, because surface roughness is closer to the object dimension as in optical imaging. The reduction of speckle is highly desirable and we propose here a Hadamard matrix solution, which is one of the most efficient ways to reduce speckle noise. By illuminating the object with a series of orthogonal phase patterns corresponding to permutations of Hadamard matrices, one can convert the sum of electrical fields (coherent) in the image pixel into a sum of intensities (non-coherent). We report a 50% speckle reduction. The effect of speckle reduction was measured using both a vector network analyzer and a W-band free-space scalar calibrated measurement setup. We processed 2 different Hadamard diffusers and present here measurement data discussing speckle contrast as a function of frequency.