Abstract
The theory of speckle in partially coherent, monochromatic light is extended to cover the entire range of object roughness. For “almost white-noise” objects it is shown how the speckle statistics are related to a Gaussian approximation of the object statistics. Within this approximation, general relations are derived for the spatial speckle correlation and the spatial Wiener spectrum. The theory is applied to calculate rms speckle contrast as function of object roughness, coherence of the illumination, and receiver plane defocusing.