Multiplicative to Additive Speckle Noise Conversion via Phase Cancellation with Photorefractive Phase Conjugators

A new technique for dealing with multiplicative complex speckle noise on coherently imaged amplitude objects is presented. This technique uses phase cancellation via quadratic nonlinearity to convert the multiplicative noise into additive noise on the Fourier spectrum. This is accomplished using a noisy image as the pump and a clean planar reference beam as the probe in a degenerate four-wave mixing phase conjugator. The counterpropagating pump is provided by the phase conjugate of the noisy image from a total internal reflection self-pumped phase conjugator whose input is the noisy image transmitted through the first crystal. The phase conjugate output is read off from the clean probe; the remaining noise on the Fourier spectrum of the output image is additive and can be removed by nonlinear filtering in the Fourier plane [1].