Affordable High-Frequency Interrogation of Optical Fiber Speckle Sensors with Event-Based Cameras

Speckle-based fiber optical sensors are well-known to offer extreme sensitivity to various applied external stimuli[1], [2]. Yet their performance is often bounded on the interrogation side, with camera frame rates and dynamic range posing harsh limitations in particular when probing dynamical perturbations entering the kHz range or higher [1], [2]. Leveraging on recent technological advances, event-based vision sensors (EVS) may provide a promising yet underexplored alternative for this application: offering low-latency detection of dynamic illumination changes with a frequency response up to the MHz range, EVS may allow to probe very fast variations in speckle patterns with unprecedented temporal resolution [3], capturing transient events that conventional cameras fail to resolve and that are only accessible with extremely costly devices [2].