Speckle, a granular structure appearing in images and diffraction patterns produced by objects that are rough on the scale of an optical wavelength, is a ubiquitous phenomenon, appearing in optics, acoustics, microwaves, and other fields. This book provides comprehensive coverage of this subject, including both the underlying statistical theory and the applications of this phenomenon. This second edition offers improvements of several topics and addition of significant amounts of new material, including discussion of: generalized random walks, speckle in the eye, polarization speckle (and the statistics of the Stokes parameters in a speckle pattern), the effects of angle and wavelength changes on speckle, the statistics of speckle from “smooth” surfaces, and a spectrometer based on speckle. Many new references are also included. As with the first edition, a multitude of areas of application are covered.

“In the mid-1960s, a young Joseph Goodman, working at the Stanford Electronics Laboratories, wrote a detailed, but unpublished, report that established the basic statistical properties of speckle. Forty years later he wrote the most comprehensive book on the subject—Speckle Phenomena in Optics: Theory and Applications (2007), which became an instant classic and is the definitive text book. Goodman, the master of his subject, now presents an excellent second edition of an already excellent book.”
—Christopher Dainty, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

“This second edition of Goodman’s classic Speckle Phenomena in Optics tells it all. It gives a detailed description of speckle, explains the techniques for suppressing speckle, and gives several applications of speckle in imaging and metrology.”
—James C. Wyant, University of Arizona

“When Goodman’s Speckle Phenomena in Optics was published in 2007, it became my primary reference for understanding speckle, which occurs in many diverse areas such as coherent optics, radar, and ultrasound. This second edition maintains Goodman’s signature clarity.”
—James R. Fienup, University of Rochester

To explain the origins of this second edition of Speckle Phenomena in Optics, it is first helpful to trace the history of the first edition. The book was originally published by Roberts & Company Publishers (a small startup publisher) in 2007. Roberts & Company was subsequently acquired by MacMillan Publishing Company. The book continued to be published by MacMillan under the Roberts & Company label. In 2019, MacMillan decided not to continue marketing and selling the book, and returned the copyright to me, the author. In the meantime, over a period of three or four years, I had been adding material to the manuscript and making certain revisions to the original manuscript in preparation for an improved second edition. In this Preface, I outline some of the improvements that the reader will find in the second edition.

The first set of improvements I would call "stylistic." A reviewer of the first edition pointed out that some equations (especially those with exponents) had been set in a typeface that was too small to read without a magnifying glass. All equations with this problem have been modified to improve their readability. A second stylistic problem was that in many figures, the curves representing results of the analyses had been drawn with a point size that was too small, so that they appeared too faint in the figures, at least too faint for my taste. This error has been corrected throughout.

In addition to these stylistic changes, considerable material has been added to this new edition:

   • A new Section 3.2.4 considers a random walk with random-length phasors, introducing different models for the length statistics;

   • A new Section 3.2.5 considers a random walk with a random number of random-length phasors;

   • Sections 4.1 through 4.3 have been generalized so that they can be applied to the subject of polarization speckle in later sections;

   • In Chapter 4, entirely new Sections 4.5 and 4.6 have been added covering the subject of polarization in speckle patterns, including statistics of the Stokes parameters and polarization speckle;

   • Sections 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7 are new simplified explanations of the effects of a change of angle-of-illumination and change of wavelength on the spatial structure of speckle;

   • Sections 5.8 and 5.9 are new simplified explanations of the spatial structure of speckle in an in-focus imaging system and an out-of-focus imaging system;

   • Section 6.1 in the original edition contained an incorrect discussion of speckle in the eye; this discussion has been corrected in the second edition;

   • Section 7.6 is an entirely new discussion of the characteristics of speckle produced by "smooth" surfaces;

   • Section 8.3 is a new section discussing how to create a spectrometer that measures the spectrum of a source from the speckle it produces; and

   • A number of new references have been introduced in the second edition.

The reader may note that some of the material presented in Chapter 4 of the first edition has been moved to a new Chapter 5 entitled "Spatial Structure of Speckle" in the second edition, a move that seemed logical when coupled with the several new sections introduced in that chapter.

I would like to thank Prof. Mitsuo Takeda and Prof. Wei Wang for educating me on the subject of polarization speckle. I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to two anonymous reviewers whose comments were extremely helpful in preparing the final version of the manuscript. Again I thank my wife, Honmai, for tolerating my many hours at the computer working on this new edition. Finally, I thank Ms. Dara Burrows of SPIE for her extremely careful copy editing of the manuscript; her suggestions improved the book significantly.

Joseph W. Goodman
November 2019