Regular papers

Principal component analysis in the spectral analysis of the dynamic laser speckle patterns

¹ Engineering Department, Federal University of Lavras, Lavras, Postal Address 3037, 37200-000, MG, Brazil
² Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland, Aberdeen, AB21 9SB, Aberdeen, Scotland
³ Exact Science Department, Federal University of Lavras, Lavras, Postal Address 3037, 37200-000, MG, Brazil

^a klebermariano@gmail.com
^b robbraga@deg.ufla.br
^c g.horgan@abdn.ac.uk
^d danton@deg.ufla.br
^e safadi@dex.ufla.br

Received: 22 November 2013
Revised: 24 January 2014

Abstract

Dynamic laser speckle is a phenomenon that interprets an optical patterns formed by illuminating a surface under changes with coherent light. Therefore, the dynamic change of the speckle patterns caused by biological material is known as biospeckle. Usually, these patterns of optical interference evolving in time are analyzed by graphical or numerical methods, and the analysis in frequency domain has also been an option, however involving large computational requirements which demands new approaches to filter the images in time. Principal component analysis (PCA) works with the statistical decorrelation of data and it can be used as a data filtering. In this context, the present work evaluated the PCA technique to filter in time the data from the biospeckle images aiming the reduction of time computer consuming and improving the robustness of the filtering. It was used 64 images of biospeckle in time observed in a maize seed. The images were arranged in a data matrix and statistically uncorrelated by PCA technique, and the reconstructed signals were analyzed using the routine graphical and numerical methods to analyze the biospeckle. Results showed the potential of the PCA tool in filtering the dynamic laser speckle data, with the definition of markers of principal components related to the biological phenomena and with the advantage of fast computational processing.