ABSTRACT
Lasers offer a fast but controllable way to extract energy rapidly from a storage medium. Pulse compression techniques can be used to squeeze the duration of a single pulse of laser light to a few femtoseconds. However, the fundamental properties of the laser which make it a useful tool for high-speed imaging were known then and are discussed in this chapter. Fuller has reviewed conventional lighting techniques for high-speed imaging, and also touched on laser illumination. Laser speckle is usually undesirable, introducing an intrusive random background into the image intensity, although it can be exploited in the electronic speckle pattern interferometry technique. Measurements of all of these properties can be made using laser-based high-speed imaging techniques, largely with the same equipment. The low divergence of lasers can be useful for high-speed imaging if the light source must be situated far from the subject to be imaged.
