Skin perfusion photography

Abstract

The separation of global and direct light components of a scene is highly useful for scene analysis, as each component offers different information about illumination-scene-detector interactions. Relying on ray optics, the technique is important in computational photography, but it is often under appreciated in the biomedical imaging community, where wave interference effects are utilized. Nevertheless, such coherent optical systems lend themselves naturally to global-direct separation methods because of the high spatial frequency nature of speckle interference patterns. Here, we extend global-direct separation to laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) system to reconstruct speed maps of blood flow in skin. We compare experimental results with a speckle formation model of moving objects and show that the reconstructed map of skin perfusion is improved over the conventional case.