Avoidance of speckle noise in laser vibrometry by the use of kurtosis ratio: Application to mechanical fault diagnostics

This paper presents a statistical technique to enhance vibration signals measured by laser Doppler vibrometry (LDV). The method has been optimised for LDV signals measured on bearings of universal electric motors and applied to quality control of washing machines. Inherent problems of LDV are addressed, particularly the speckle noise occurring when rough surfaces are measured. The presence of speckle noise is detected using a new scalar indicator kurtosis ratio (KR), specifically designed to quantify the amount of random impulses generated by this noise. The KR is a ratio of the standard kurtosis and a robust estimate of kurtosis, thus indicating the outliers in the data. Since it is inefficient to reject the signals affected by the speckle noise, an algorithm for selecting an undistorted portion of a signal is proposed. The algorithm operates in the time domain and is thus fast and simple. The algorithm includes band-pass filtering and segmentation of the signal, as well as thresholding of the KR computed for each filtered signal segment. Algorithm parameters are discussed in detail and instructions for optimisation are provided. Experimental results demonstrate that speckle noise is effectively avoided in severely distorted signals, thus improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) significantly. Typical faults are finally detected using squared envelope analysis. It is also shown that the KR of the band-pass filtered signal is related to the spectral kurtosis (SK).