Robust decorrelation-based iterative algorithm for accurate phase extraction from disturbed fringe patterns.

We propose an accurate and robust phase extraction method for phase-shifting interferometry to reduce the phase ripple error caused by illumination, contrast, phase-shift spatiotemporal variation, and intensity harmonics. In this method, a general physical model of interference fringes is constructed, and the parameters are decoupled using a Taylor expansion linearization approximation. In the iterative process, the estimated illumination and contrast spatial distributions are decorrelated from the phase, thus reducing damage to the algorithm's robustness caused by a large number of linear model approximations. To the best of our knowledge, no method has been able to extract the phase distribution robustly and with high accuracy while considering all of these error sources simultaneously without imposing constraints inconsistent with the practical conditions.