High-speed fringe analysis by using stair-shaped virtual grating demodulation

This article describes a novel fringe analysis technique using stair-shaped virtual grating demodulation algorithm for extracting the phase information from a single fringe pattern. In contrast to the Fourier transform technique and quadrature multiplicative moire method, the new method processes a fringe pattern in the integer signal domain instead of the frequency domain and real-signal domain. The spatial carrier of fringe image is not limited to any particular frequency as long as it fulfills the sampling theorem. The errors analysis of this technique is conducted by computer simulation and experiments.