Efficient processing of laser speckle contrast images

Abstract

Though laser speckle contrast imaging enables the measurement of scattering particle dynamics with high temporal resolution, the subsequent processing has previously been much slower. In prior studies, generating a laser speckle contrast image required about 1 s to process a raw image potentially collected in 10 ms or less. In this paper, novel algorithms are described which are demonstrated to convert 291 raw images per second to laser speckle contrast images and as many as 410 laser speckle contrast images per second to relative correlation time images. As long as image processing occurs during image acquisition, these algorithms render processing time irrelevant in most circumstances and enable real-time imaging of blood flow dynamics.