[en] Optical ultrasonic wave detection techniques are being developed for process monitoring. An important limitation on optical techniques is that the material surface, in materials processing applications, is usually not a specular reflector and in many cases is totally diffusely reflecting. This severely degrades the light collected by the detection optics, greatly reducing the intensity and randomly scattering the phase of the reflected light. A confocal Fabry-Perot interferometer, which is sensitive to the Doppler frequency shift resulting from the surface motion and not to the phase of the collected light, is well suited to detecting ultrasonic waves in diffusely reflecting materials. This paper describes the application of this detector to the real-time monitoring of the sintering of ceramic materials. 8 refs., 5 figs