An improved windowed Fourier transform for fringe demodulation

A modified algorithm of windowed Fourier transform (WFT) for phase retrieval from electronic speckle-shearing fringe patterns with carriers is proposed. The algorithm is based on the introduction of a fast Fourier transform (FFT) in WFT to reduce computation time for fringe demodulation. Since boundary effects in FFT will influence the accuracy of phase retrieval, the Gerchberg method is employed to extrapolate the fringe pattern at the boundaries to reduce boundary effects. A theoretical analysis of the algorithm is presented. Both simulated and experimental results show that the proposed method has reduced the computation time significantly compared with the convolution method of WFT without sacrificing measurement accuracy. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.