Phase recovery from fringe patterns using the continuous wavelet transform

Interferometry is well established as an optical technique in which a measurand is encoded as the phase of a periodically varying intensity pattern. In view of the inherent accuracy of interferometry, many methods have been developed to retrieve the phase from images of the fringe pattern. Our focus in this paper is one such technique—the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). We begin by reviewing the CWT and the space–spatial–frequency localisation properties of wavelets. We show that a path which follows the maximum modulus of the CWT (the wavelet ridge) gives the instantaneous fringe frequency as a function of spatial displacement. The phase is automatically and trivially obtained, without discontinuities, by integration. Examples of practical wavelets are given and algorithms to isolate the wavelet ridge reviewed.