A new wavelet transform for reliability-guided phase unwrapping of optical fringe patterns

A new daughter wavelet definition for reliability-guided phase unwrapping of the optical fringe pattern is introduced. The new daughter wavelet definition is given by normalized mother wavelet with a new factor including a Gaussian function. The modulus of the wavelet transform coefficients, obtained by using daughter wavelet under this new daughter wavelet definition, includes not only modulation information but also local frequency information of the deformed fringe pattern. Therefore, it can be treated as a good parameter which represents the reliability of the reconstructed phase data. Mathematical demonstration of this parameter is given. Both the computer simulation and experiment reveal the validity of the proposed method.     

Absolute phase recovery of three fringe patterns with selected spatial frequencies

A new temporal approach is presented for the recovery of the absolute phase maps from their wrapped versions based on the use of fringe patterns of three different spatial frequencies. In contrast to the two-frequency method recently published, the method proposed is characterized by better anti-error capability as measured by phase error tolerance bound. A general rule for the selection of the three frequencies is presented, and its relationship to the phase error tolerance bound is derived. Theoretical analysis and experimental results are also presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed three frequency technique.     

An improved stair phase encoding method for absolute phase retrieval

An improved phase unwrapping method is proposed to reduce the projection fringes in three-dimensional (3D) surface measurement. Color fringe patterns are generated by encoding with sinusoidal fringe and stair phase fringe patterns in red and blue channels. These color fringe patterns are projected onto the tested objects and then captured by a color CCD camera. The recorded fringe patterns are separated into their RGB components. Two groups of four-step phase-shifting fringe patterns are obtained. One group of the stripes are four sinusoidal patterns, which are used to determine the wrapped phase. The other group of stripes are four sinusoidal patterns with the codeword embedded into stair phase, whose stair changes are perfectly aligned with the 2π discontinuities of sinusoidal fringe phase, which are used to determine the fringe order for the phase unwrapping. The experimental results are analyzed and compared with those of the method in Zheng and Da (2012. Opt Express 20(22):24139–24150). The results show that the proposed method needs only four fringe patterns while having less error. It can effectively reduce the number of projection fringes and improve the measuring speed.     

A derivative based simplified phase tracker for a single fringe pattern demodulation

In this paper, a novel fringe demodulation method for the estimation of phase and its first-order derivative from a closed-fringe interferogram is proposed. The proposed method determines the phase derivatives in both x&y directions from fringe orientation and density. The phase derivatives are subsequently used to determine phase values using a novel simplified phase tracker. In the phase tracking model, the complexity of the cost function is reduced using predetermined derivatives so computation time required for phase tracking is reduced considerably. The proposed model is more robust while dealing with saddle points in fringes than the conventional phase tracker model. Hence it does not require any specialized scanning strategy. The proposed method is validated with simulated and experimental fringe patterns (obtained using electronic speckle pattern interferometry and optical holographic interferometry) and a comparison study is carried out with conventional regularized phase tracker. The simulation results show that the proposed method has good accuracy and requires less computation time than existing phase-tracking algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method against speckle noise and its practical applicability for static and dynamic applications.     

The leveling of mask and wafer in proximity nanolithography using fringe pattern phase analysis

The fringe pattern phase analysis method is proposed for the leveling of mask and wafer in proximity lithography. The tilt between mask and wafer in the space is reflected in the tilted fringe pattern. The method combining the 2-D Fourier transform and 2-D Hanning window is proposed for processing the tilted fringe pattern. The offset and angle of tilt are extracted through phase analysis. Computer simulation and experiment are both performed to verify this method. The results indicate that the tilt of the mask and wafer in the space can be extracted with high accuracy through this method.     

A numerical spatial carrier for single fringe pattern analysis algorithm

Hilbert transform and continuous wavelet transform are combined to form an algorithm for the analysis of a single fringe pattern with open or closed fringes. Only one recorded fringe pattern is needed to extract the phase information. A second π/2 phase shifted fringe pattern should first be generated from the other using Hilbert transform to superpose numerically the spatial carrier. Several phase extraction techniques are conceived to demodulate fringe patterns. In this paper, the wavelet technique is used to obtain the required phase distribution. The algorithm offers an advantage that it is appropriate when the spatial carrier is impossible to be added experimentally. Finally, a simulation was carried out to validate the algorithm, giving good results.     

A digital spatial carrier for wavelet phase extraction

In this paper, we present a new method to digitally add a high-frequency spatial carrier in order to use the wavelet phase extraction algorithm, which leads directly to the phase without the unwrapping process. The method needs a fringe pattern and its π/2 shifted version. The application is performed with two shifted fringe patterns obtained from the phase shifting images of the thermomechanical study of an MOS power transistor. A comparison with the phase shifting results is made.     

Lens distortion elimination for improving measurement accuracy of fringe projection profilometry

Fringe projection profilometry (FPP) is a powerful method for three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement. However, the measurement accuracy of the existing FPP is often hindered by the distortion of the lens used in FPP. In this paper, a simple and efficient method is presented to overcome this problem. First, the FPP system is calibrated as a stereovision system. Then, the camera lens distortion is eliminated by correcting the captured images. For the projector lens distortion, distorted fringe patterns are generated according to the lens distortion model. With these distorted fringe patterns, the projector can project undistorted fringe patterns, which means that the projector lens distortion is eliminated. Experimental results show that the proposed method can successfully eliminate the lens distortions of FPP and therefore improves its measurement accuracy.     

Two-step fringe pattern analysis with a Gabor filter bank

We propose a two-shot fringe analysis method for Fringe Patterns (FPs) with random phase-shift and changes in illumination components. These conditions reduce the acquisition time and simplify the experimental setup. Our method builds upon a Gabor Filter (GF) bank that eliminates noise and estimates the phase from the FPs. The GF bank allows us to obtain two phase maps with a sign ambiguity between them. Due to the fact that the random sign map is common to both computed phases, we can correct the sign ambiguity. We estimate a local phase-shift from the absolute wrapped residual between the estimated phases. Next, we robustly compute the global phase-shift. In order to unwrap the phase, we propose a robust procedure that interpolates unreliable phase regions obtained after applying the GF bank. We present numerical experiments that demonstrate the performance of our method.     

Reply to comment on “A new method for phase extraction from a single fringe pattern”

In response to the comment made by Ferrari on our previous paper [C.J. Tay, C. Quan, F.J. Yang, X.Y. He, Opt. Commun. 239 (2004) 251], we have the following clarifications to make.     

A novel fringe adaptation method for digital projector

Aimed to obtain high-quality sinusoidal fringe projection, a new method to correct the output fringe of digital projector is presented. The method is based on the proposed fringe transform model, which describes the relationship of the input and output fringe pattern. Firstly, a series of fringe patterns are projected and from the fringe images, the transform function is calculated by the pattern shifting method. At last, by modifying the input fringe pattern, a standard sinusoidal output fringe can be achieved. Different from the previous methods, the waveform nonlinearity is estimated by varying the intensity of the projected fringe pixel by pixel; thus the waveform nonlinearity can be estimated precisely and the time cost is considerably reduced. Experimental results show that by modification of the input projection patterns the projector can project fringe with high-quality sinusoidal waveform leading to high performance of the projection system.     

Multi-frequency inverse-phase fringe projection profilometry for nonlinear phase error compensation

A new multi-frequency inverse-phase method was proposed to compensate for nonlinear phase errors in fringe projection profilometry and to measure the three-dimensional shape of discontinuous objects. After introducing a phase offset of π/4 into the multi-frequency four-step phase-shifting method the corresponding nonlinear phase error reversed its sign, which allowed the addition of unwrapped phases before and after the phase-offset operation to compensate for the error. For the four-step phase-shifting method, simulation analysis showed that the nonlinear phase error had quadrupled the fringe frequency. Moreover, experimental results verified the feasibility and applicability of the proposed method.     

A correlation-based phase unwrapping method for Fourier-transform profilometry

A new phase unwrapping algorithm based on correlation map for Fourier-transform profilometry (FTP) method is presented in this paper. It is a quality-guided phase-unwrapping method. The modulation is used as an effective parameter to indicate the reliability of the fringe image for the quality-guided phase-unwrapping method. A filtering window is introduced to calculate the modulation easily. A correlation-map function is proposed to calculate the reliability of the fringe image and to avoid choosing the width of the window in calculating the modulation. As the value of the correlation-map function is lower in areas of the local shadow and abrupt discontinuity than that in other areas, the correlation-map function is used as a guide to find the optimized phase-unwrapping path. The experimental results show that the method is feasible.     

Analysis of phase distortion in phase-shifted fringe projection

This paper describes the analysis of phase distortion in phase-shifted fringe projection method. A phase distortion occurs when the phase shifting technique is applied to extract the phase values from projected fringe patterns in surface contouring. The phase distortion will induce measurement errors especially in the measurement of micro-components. The cause of such phase distortion is investigated and the influence of phase distortion on the measurement of micro-components is discussed. To eliminate the phase distortion, a continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is employed to extract phase values from object surface modulated fringe patterns. Principle of the proposed CWT phase extraction method is described and experiments are conducted to verify the proposed method. It is shown that by the use of CWT phase extraction method phase distortion induced in conventional phase-shifting technique can be completely eliminated.     

Application of robust color composite fringe in flip-chip solder bump 3-D measurement

This study developed a 3-D measurement system based on flip-chip solder bump, used fringes with different modulation intensities in color channels, in order to produce color composite fringe with robustness, and proposed a multi-channel composite phase unwrapping algorithm, which uses fringe modulation weights of different channels to recombine the phase information for better measurement accuracy and stability. The experimental results showed that the average measurement accuracy is 0.43μm and the standard deviation is 1.38 µm. The results thus proved that the proposed 3-D measurement system is effective in measuring a plane with a height of 50 μm. In the flip-chip solder bump measuring experiment, different fringe modulation configurations were tested to overcome the problem of reflective coefficient between the flip-chip base board and the solder bump. The proposed system has a good measurement results and robust stability in the solder bump measurement, and can be used for the measurement of 3-D information for micron flip-chip solder bump application.     

Phase retrieval of non-continuous fringe patterns by a genetic data reduction algorithm

In this work we focus on the possibilities of recovering the phase from a single fringe pattern that do not have a fringe order sequence or whose fringes are broken. The phase is obtained with a polynomial fitting method whose coefficients are calculated with a genetic algorithm technique that constrains the smoothness of the solutions of a merit function. It is explained how conjugate gradient methods fail in the solution of the proposed merit function. Experimental results are presented using discontinuous fringe patterns obtained from a grazing incidence interferometer while testing a polishing tool.     

3D shape from phase errors by using binary fringe with multi-step phase-shift technique

A three-dimensional shape measurement method is presented, which is a uniaxial measurement by measuring phase errors instead of the well-known phase, modulation or contrast. A sequence of exposures are captured by using a multi-step phase-shift technique with the binary fringes. Then the high-accuracy phases can be obtained by using all the exposures, meanwhile, a set of low-accuracy phases can be calculated by dividing those exposures into a set of four-step phase-shift measurements. For each pixel there will be a set of phase errors by subtracting low-accuracy phases from the high-accuracy ones. And the weighted phase error of every pixel can be calculated. Meanwhile the phase error caused by the improperly defocused binary fringes has a unique relationship with the depth z. Therefore, the 3D information of every pixel can be obtained by analyzing the phase errors. It will be promising for a uniaxial measurement, such as deep holes.     

Patch-wise denoising of phase fringe patterns based on matrix enhancement

We propose a new approach for the denoising of a phase fringe pattern recorded in an optical interferometric setup. The phase fringe pattern which is generally corrupted by high amount of speckle noise is first converted into an exponential phase field. This phase field is divided into a number of overlapping patches. Owing to the small size of each patch, the presence of a simple structure of the interference phase is assumed in it. Accordingly, the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the patch allows us to separate the signal and noise components effectively. The patch is reconstructed only with the signal component. In order to further improve the robustness of the proposed method, an enhanced data matrix is generated using the patch and the SVD of this enhanced matrix is computed. The matrix enhancement results in an increased dimension of the noise subspace which thus accommodates more amount of noise component. Reassignment of the filtered pixels of the preceding patch in the current patch improves the noise filtering accuracy. The fringe denoising capability in function of the noise level and the patch size is studied. Simulation and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed method.     

Applications of windowed Fourier fringe analysis in optical measurement: A review

The applications of windowed Fourier fringe analysis in the past decade are reviewed. Because fringe patterns from different optical measurement systems are similar, the reviewed applications are classified according to the functions of the windowed Fourier transform being used in fringe pattern analysis: denosing exponential phase fields, demodulating carrier fringe patterns, getting phase derivatives, and utilizing local properties. From these applications, the windowed Fourier transform is shown to be effective and versatile for fringe pattern analysis.