New fourth-order partial differential equations for filtering in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringes

Partial differential equations (PDEs) based methods have been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for filtering in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe or wrapped phase patterns. In this paper, we derive the new fourth-order partial differential equations (NFOPDE) with a better performance for filtering in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe patterns based on the variational methods. We test the proposed models on two computer-simulated speckle fringe patterns and an experimentally obtained fringe pattern, respectively, and compare our models with the widely used, well-known the second-order selective degenerate diffusion PDE model (SOSDPDE) and the published fourth-order PDE model (PFOPDE). The proposed NFOPDE can overcome the shortages that both the SOSDPDE and PFOPDE encounter. In all cases, our NFOPDE outperforms SOSDPDE and PFOPDE. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.