382 CHINESE OPTICS LETTERS / Vol. 4, No. 7 / July 10, 2006
Tracking speckle displacement by double Kalman filtering
Dongh ui Li (
üüü
ÞÞÞ
) and Li Guo (
)
Department of Electronic Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Heifei 230027
Received March 3, 2006
A tracking technique using two sequentially-connected Kalman filter for tracking laser speckle displacement
is presented. One Kalman filter tracks temporal speckle displacement, while another Kalman filter tracks
spatial speckle displacement. The temporal Kalman filter provides a prior for the spatial Kalman filter,
and the spatial Kalman filter provides measurements for the temporal Kalman filter. The contribution of
a prior to estimations of the spatial Kalman filter is analyzed. An optical analysis system was set up to
verify the double-Kalman-filter tracker’s ability of tracking laser speckle’s constant displacement.
OCIS codes: 030.6140, 070.6020, 120.3940.
Laser speckle technique
[1]
has wide-range applications
such as experimental mechanics, machine control, ve-
locimetry, electronic element package, and so on. Some of
these applications involve object motion tracking, which
estimates motion state evolution from noisy measure-
ments. Kalman filters
[2−4]
have been applied in ob-
ject tracking, such as maneuvering target tracking, for
a long time. In these object-tracking applications, mea-
surements or observations are available; however, object’s
motion states such as displacement, velocity and so on,
are unknown. The goal is to estimate states from noise-
contaminated measurements as accurately as possible.
Kalman filter, which represents the problem in time field
and state space, can obtain optimal estimation for linear-
Gaussian environment. For arbitrary statistics, Kalman
filter is the best linear estimator. Nonlinear problem
could be approximately solved through extended Kalman
filter
[5,6]
which involves a linearization process. Kalman
filter is recursively Bayesian in that it obtains a prior via
prediction process and then obtains posterior of states
via update process.
This paper presents a speckle tracker consisting of
two sequentially-connected Kalman filters. One of
them estimates speckle temporal displacement; another
Kalman filter estimates speckle spatial displacement.
The sequentially-constructed tracker guarantees that the
temporal Kalman filter provides initial parameter es-
timations for the spatial Kalman filter and the spa-
tial Kalman filter provides accurate measurements for
the temporal Kalman filter. Speckle displacement
could be figured out through such methods as least-
square
[7]
,interpolation
[8,9]
, fuzzy correlation
[10]
,andso
on. These methods, however, do not consider a prior
which could help improving estimation precision. The
double-Kalman-filter tracker considers motion dynam-
ics as Markov process and computes speckle displace-
ment through Kalman filtering. The double-Kalman-
filter tracker, thus, could track speckle displacement ac-
curately.
The double-Kalman-filter tracker is illustrated in Fig.
1. Speckle displacement in a subimage is estimated by
a maximum likelihood method. Speckle displacement in
whole image is estimated by the spatial Kalman filter
which makes use of subimage’s computation as measure-
ment. The spatial Kalman filter’s initial state is pro-
vided by prediction estimation produced by the tempo-
ral Kalman filter at the last time. The temporal Kalman
filter makes use of measurements provided by the spatial
Kalman filter to estimate speckle displacement at cur-
rent time. The tracker’s sequential structure makes sure
that one Kalman filter can utilize another Kalman filter’s
outputs for a good estimation of speckle displacement. In
Fig. 1, I
k
and I
k−1
are two speckle images fetched at dis-
crete time kT and (k − 1)T ,wherek ≥ 2andT is the
time interval. ˆx
k
(N|Z
N
) is the spatial Kalman filter’s
filtering output. ˆx
k
(M
k
)andˆx
k+1
(M
k
)arethetempo-
ral Kalman filter’s filtering output and prediction out-
put, respectively. Z
−1
denotes unit delay.
If I
1
denotes reference speckle image obtained before
object motion, I
2
denotes comparison speckle image ob-
tained after object motion, then I
1
and I
2
have the rela-
tionship as
I
1
(r)=I
2
(r + U ), (1)
I
1
(r − U )=I
2
(r), (2)
where r denotes the location of a pixel in the speckle
image, and U denotes speckle displacement vector. Dis-
placements at pixel r and its neighborhood Ω
r
could be
assumed a constant U.
Expanding Eqs. (1) and (2) into Taylor series and ne-
glecting the second and higher order components yield
I
1
(r)=I
2
(r)+∇I
2
(r) · U, (3)
I
2
(r)=I
1
(r) −∇I
1
(r) · U, (4)
where ∇I
1
(r)and∇I
2
(r) are spatial gradients of two
speckle images. Equations (3) and (4) can be rearranged
as
Fig. 1. Double-Kalman-filter tracker.
1671-7694/2006/070382-04 http://www.col.org.cn