Phase extraction in speckle interferometry by a circle fitting procedure in the complex plane

In speckle interferometry (SI), temporal signals are amplitude- and frequency-modulated signals and exhibit a fluctuating background. Prior to phase computation, this background intensity must be eliminated. Here our approach is to build a complex signal from the raw one and to fit a circle through the points cloud representing its sampled values in the complex plane. The circle fit is computed from a set of points whose length is locally adapted to the signal. This procedure—new to our knowledge in SI—yields the background and the modulation depth and leads to the determination of the instantaneous frequency. The method, applied to simulated and experimental signals, is compared to empirical mode decomposition (EMD). It shows great robustness in the computation of the sought quantities in SI, especially with signals close to the critical sampling or, on the contrary, highly oversampled, situations where the background elimination by EMD is the most prone to errors.