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> Wavy stripes that are difficult to average away in the worst case and
> horizontal lines reminiscent of the scan lines in the best case.
>

If you are really seeing periodic stripes, then do a Fourier transform
(FFT) on your images. [Not to worry, lots of image processing programs
will do this very nicely -- I use Image Pro Plus, and ImageJ also has
an FFT plugin.] You will see a well defined point that corresponds to the
spatial frequency of the stripes. Try cutting out that point (and its
symmetric conjugate, which you will see) and then doing an inverse
transform. You may be very pleasantly surprised. This will work even better
if you have an optical interference pattern and the stripe is sinusoidal.

This does not do away with the need to fix the underlying problem, but may
privide usable images.

--aryeh
Aryeh Weiss                          | email: [log in to unmask]
Department of Electronics            | URL:   http://optics.jct.ac.il/~aryeh
Jerusalem College of Technology      | phone: 972-2-6751146
POB 16031                            | FAX:   972-2-6751275
Jerusalem, Israel                    | ham radio: 4X1PB/KA1PB