Speckle suppression in scanning laser displays: aberration and defocusing of the projection system

Aberration and defocusing effects in the mechanism of speckle suppression in laser projection displays were studied using the Fresnel approximation and the thin lens model. The analysis was performed with the assumption that aberrations change only the phase (and not the amplitude) in the rear principal plane of the display projection system. The analysis showed that aberrations should not have any influence on speckle contrast. It also showed that a screen shift relative to the image plane (defocusing) results only in a rescaling of the scanning beam autocorrelation function, which is equivalent to refocusing the objective lens to a new position of the screen. The optimal beam shape for optimal speckle suppression was also studied. A homogeneous field intensity distribution in the spatial frequency domain was found to provide close to the best speckle suppression.