Reduction of speckles in retinal reflection

Speckle noise can deteriorate the quality of wave-front sensors measuring ocular aberrations. To counter that, a narrow laser beam was acoustically modulated before entering the eye and creating a spot on the retina. Light was scattered back through the aberrations into the sensor. The increased spot size, wider angular spread, and temporal modulation of the incoming beam averaged out the speckles, producing a more uniform response of the wave-front sensor. The method applies also to retinal imagers and to nonbiological speckle.