Automatic look-up table based real-time phase unwrapping for phase measuring profilometry and optimal reference frequency selection

• Published in: Optics express Vol. 27; no. 9; pp. 13357 - 13371
• Main Authors: Song, Jianwen, Lau, Daniel L, Ho, Yo-Sung, Liu, Kai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 29.04.2019
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.27.013357

For temporal phase unwrapping in phase measuring profilometry, it has recently been reported that two phases with co-prime frequencies can be absolutely unwrapped using a look-up table; however, frequency selection and table construction has been performed manually without optimization. In this paper, a universal phase unwrapping method is proposed to unwrap phase flexibly and automatically by using geometric analysis, and thus we can programmatically build a one-dimensional or two-dimensional look-up table for arbitrary two co-prime frequencies to correctly unwrap phases in real time. Moreover, a phase error model related to the defocus effect is derived to figure out an optimal reference frequency co-prime to the principal frequency. Experimental results verify the correctness and computational efficiency of the proposed method.