The application of digital filtering to phase recovery when surface contouring using fringe projection techniques

If structured light consisting of parallel stripes, or fringes, is projected onto a surface, then the surface acts as a phase modulator, with the amount of modulation at any point depending upon the height of the surface at that point. In recent years considerable effort has been devoted to the problem of fringe demodulation, with prominence given to techniques using fringe-phase stepping and Fourier analysis. It has long been known that phase demodulation is possible using a system of filters, and the technique has been widely used in the related area of frequency demodulation in radio. In this paper the development of phase demodulation using a system of digital filters is considered. For the accurate recovery of image phase it is necessary for the filters to introduce zero phase shift, or to have a phase shift proportional to frequency. The design of the digital filters is considered and their performance is assessed using the signal from a real modulated fringe pattern and a simulated signal. It is shown that the demodulation technique works well, even with a poor signal-to-noise ratio. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.