Three-step self-calibrating generalized phase-shifting interferometry

An accurate and fast three-step self-calibrating generalized phase-shifting interferomertry (SGPSI) is proposed. In this approach, two new phase-shifting signals are constructed by the difference interferograms normalization and noise suppressing, then the unknown phase shift between the two difference phase-shifting signals is estimated quickly through searching the minimum coefficient of variation of the modulation amplitude, a limited number of pixels are selected to participate in the search process to further save time, and finally the phase is reconstructed through the searched phase shift. Through the reconstruction of phase map by the simulation and experiment, and the comparison with several mature algorithms, the good performance of the proposed algorithm is proved, and it eliminates the limitation of requiring more than three phase-shifting interferograms for high-precision SGPSI. We expect this method to be widely used in the future.