Evaluation of activity through dynamic laser speckle using the absolute value of the differences

When a material is illuminated with a laser beam, it is possible to verify a phenomenon known as dynamic speckle or biospeckle. It exhibits an interference image that contains lots of information about the process being analyzed, and one of its most important applications is determining the activity quantity from the materials under study. The numerical analysis of the dynamic speckle images can be carried out by means of a co-occurrence matrix (COM) that assembles the intensity distributions of a speckle pattern with regard to time. An operational method that is widely used on the biospeckle COMs is the inertia moment (IM). Some studies demonstrate that IM is more sensitive on analyzing processes that involve high activities or high frequencies if considering the spectral analysis of the phenomena. However, when this variation is not so intense, this method is less efficient. For low variations on the activity or low frequencies, qualitative methods such as wavelet based entropy and cross-spectrum analysis have presented better results; however, processes that are in the intermediate range of activity are not well covered for any of these techniques mentioned earlier. The contribution of this research is to present an alternative approach, based on the absolute value of the differences (AVD) when handling the biospeckle COM. By using AVD on the seed-drying process, was found that it is efficient on verifying the behavior of the intermediate frequencies. Accumulated sum test (Coates and Diggle) showed that AVD and IM are generated from the same stochastic process. Thus, AVD is useful as an alternative method in some cases or even as a complementary tool for analyzing the dynamic speckle, mainly when the information of the activity is not present on high frequencies. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.