A digital speckle pattern interferometer based on a novel custom complementary metaloxide-
semiconductor (CMOS) array detector is described. The temporal evolution of the
dynamic deformation of a test object is measured using inter-frame phase stepping. The
flexibility of the CMOS detector is used to identify regions of interest with full-field time
averaged measurements and then to interrogate those regions with time-resolved
measurements sampled at up to 7 kHz.
The maximum surface velocity that can be measured and the number of measurement
points are limited by the frame rate and the data transfer rate of the detector. The custom
sensor used in this work is a modulated light camera (MLC), whose pixel design is still
based on the standard four transistor active pixel sensor (APS), but each pixel has four
large independently shuttered capacitors that drastically boost the well capacity from that
of the diode alone. Each capacitor represents a channel which has its own shutter switch
and can either be operated independently or in tandem with others. The particular APS of
this camera enables a novel approach in how the data are acquired and then processed.
In this Thesis we demonstrate how, at a given frame rate and at a given number of
measurement points, the data transfer rate of our system is increased if compared to the
data transfer rate of a system using a standard approach. Moreover, under some
assumptions, the gain in system bandwidth doesn’t entail any reduction in the maximum
surface velocity that can be reliably measured with inter-frame phase stepping
