Spatial shift unwrapping for digital fringe profilometry based on spatial shift estimation

An approach is presented to solve the problem of spatial shift wrapping associated with spatial shift estimation-based fringe pattern profilometry (FPP). This problem arises as the result of fringe reuses (that is, use of fringes with periodic light intensity variance), and the spatial shift can only be identified without ambiguity within the range of a fringe width. It is demonstrated that the problem is similar to the phase unwrapping problem associated with the phase-detection-based FPP, and the proposed method is inspired by the existing ideas of using multiple images with different wavelengths proposed for phase unwrapping. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparing experimental results against several objects, with the last object consisting of more complex surface features. We conclude by showing that our method is successful in reconstructing the fine details of the more complex object.