Normalization and noise-reduction algorithm for fringe patterns

This paper presents a fringe pattern normalization and noise-reduction algorithm. Locally the background noise is suppressed, the modulation normalized and the noise smoothed. An expression to calculate the cosine-only term is formulated. It is related to the directional derivatives of the intensity fringes. Two-dimensional Fourier series are used to calculate the parameters needed for the algorithm. Experimental work is presented using diffraction and ESPI images. The programming is relatively simple and involves mainly local convolutions. The processing time using a 2 GHz computer to normalize an image of 256 × 256 pixels is approximately one second.