High-quality laser beam diagnostics using modified coherent phase modulation imaging

Coherent modulation imaging (CMI) is a promising technique for online laser beam diagnostics; however, obvious speckle noise is always generated in the reconstruction, seriously degrading the spatial resolution and, accordingly, the accuracy. To solve this problem, both the optical setup of the common CMI and its reconstruction algorithm are slightly modified, and the performance of CMI in laser beam diagnostics can be obviously improved. By adding the second detector to record additional intensity distribution and using it to strengthen the intensity constraint of common CMI algorithm, the speckle noise in the reconstructed image can be distinctively reduced, and thus both the spatial resolution and the measurement accuracy are improved significantly. The feasibility of this proposed method is verified by proof-of-principle experiments. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement