New fourth-order partial differential equations for filtering in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringes

Partial differential equations (PDEs) based methods have been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for filtering in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe or wrapped phase patterns. In this paper, we derive the new fourth-order partial differential equations (NFOPDE) with a better performance for filtering in electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe patterns based on the variational methods. We test the proposed models on two computer-simulated speckle fringe patterns and an experimentally obtained fringe pattern, respectively, and compare our models with the widely used, well-known the second-order selective degenerate diffusion PDE model (SOSDPDE) and the published fourth-order PDE model (PFOPDE). The proposed NFOPDE can overcome the shortages that both the SOSDPDE and PFOPDE encounter. In all cases, our NFOPDE outperforms SOSDPDE and PFOPDE.