Convergent, recursive phase reconstruction from noisy, modulated intensity patterns by use of synthetic interferograms

We present a novel method of rapidly convergent phase reconstruction from noisy and high-fringe-density intensity patterns without a priori information. We define an error function that incorporates the measured intensity data to ensure the convergence. The error function is the absolute value of the cosine of the difference of the reconstructed phase and the unknown phase, i.e., a calculated or a synthetic interferogram. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.