Method for characterizing a material in which is formed a surface, comprising steps of: - projecting onto the surface a coherent light beam, to generate on said surface speckles resulting from interference of light rays scattered by said surface, - acquiring an image of said surface, in which the speckles appear, - processing said image to compute the values of criteria (C 1,..., C 6) characterizing the material, and - based on said criteria, determining the material from which the surface is made, wherein the step of processing the image comprises: - computation of an autocorrelation function of the light intensity in the image and computation of the value of at least one characterizing criteria (C 1,..., C 4) established based on said autocorrelation function, said computation comprising: ∘ for each pixel of the image, establishing a first matrix the eigenvalues of which indicate the degree of autocorrelation of the light intensity of said pixel with respect to the neighbouring pixels, and ∘ computation of the value of the characterizing criterion (C 2) as the mean in the image of the trace of a second matrix obtained by discrete cosine transform of the first matrix, and - computation of the value of at least one criterion (C 5, C 6) representative of a distribution of phase shifts of the light rays scattered by the surface, said computation comprising computation of a wavelet transform of the image, and computation of the value of said criterion (C 5, C 6) from among the following group: ∘ mean (C 6) of the phases of the wavelet coefficients in the image, or ∘ standard deviation (C 5) of the phases of the wavelet coefficients in the image. - projecting onto the surface a coherent light beam, to generate on said surface speckles resulting from interference of light rays scattered by said surface, - acquiring an image of said surface, in which the speckles appear, - processing said image to compute the values of criteria (C 1,..., C 6) characterizing the material, and - based on said criteria, determining the material from which the surface is made, - computation of an autocorrelation function of the light intensity in the image and computation of the value of at least one characterizing criteria (C 1,..., C 4) established based on said autocorrelation function, said computation comprising: ∘ for each pixel of the image, establishing a first matrix the eigenvalues of which indicate the degree of autocorrelation of the light intensity of said pixel with respect to the neighbouring pixels, and ∘ computation of the value of the characterizing criterion (C 2) as the mean in the image of the trace of a second matrix obtained by discrete cosine transform of the first matrix, and ∘ for each pixel of the image, establishing a first matrix the eigenvalues of which indicate the degree of autocorrelation of the light intensity of said pixel with respect to the neighbouring pixels, and ∘ computation of the value of the characterizing criterion (C 2) as the mean in the image of the trace of a second matrix obtained by discrete cosine transform of the first matrix, and - computation of the value of at least one criterion (C 5, C 6) representative of a distribution of phase shifts of the light rays scattered by the surface, said computation comprising computation of a wavelet transform of the image, and computation of the value of said criterion (C 5, C 6) from among the following group: ∘ mean (C 6) of the phases of the wavelet coefficients in the image, or ∘ standard deviation (C 5) of the phases of the wavelet coefficients in the image. ∘ mean (C 6) of the phases of the wavelet coefficients in the image, or ∘ standard deviation (C 5) of the phases of the wavelet coefficients in the image.