Real-time displacement measurement using a multicamera phase-stepping speckle interferometer

Surface point displacements can be measured by using standard phase-stepping speckle interferometry, but the measured data are vulnerable to disturbances during the interferogram recordings. To overcome this an interferometer with a computational system has been developed to record three phase-stepped interferograms simultaneously and to calculate displacements. This system is evaluated by measurements of the out-of-plane rotation of a flat surface. The surface displacement is calculated at a rate of 25 times/s. If one reduces noise by filtering, hardware limitations decrease the speed to 12.5 displacement calculations/s. With this system displacements can be measured with an accuracy exceeding λ/55 if filtering is applied.