Statistical speckle study to characterize scattering media: use of two complementary approaches.

Speckle produced by strongly-scattering media contains information about its optical properties. Statistical speckle study allows discrimination between media and enables one to characterize any change. Two approaches of the speckle phenomenon are used in the measurement of speckle produced by monodisperse-polystyrene microspheres in solution and mixtures of them: a stochastic approach based on the fractional Brownian motion and a classical frequential approach based on speckle size measurement. In this paper, we introduce an approach that contains the multi-scale aspect of the speckle; therefore it provides more information on the medium than the speckle dimension. The obtained results show that the stochastic approach allows a better samples discrimination than the classical frequential approach. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.