Patch-wise denoising of phase fringe patterns based on matrix enhancement

• A novel method for filtering of highly noisy phase fringe patterns.
• Increase in the dimension of noise subspace encompasses noise component effectively.
• Independent of fringe frequency, computationally efficient.

We propose a new approach for the denoising of a phase fringe pattern recorded in an optical interferometric setup. The phase fringe pattern which is generally corrupted by high amount of speckle noise is first converted into an exponential phase field. This phase field is divided into a number of overlapping patches. Owing to the small size of each patch, the presence of a simple structure of the interference phase is assumed in it. Accordingly, the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the patch allows us to separate the signal and noise components effectively. The patch is reconstructed only with the signal component. In order to further improve the robustness of the proposed method, an enhanced data matrix is generated using the patch and the SVD of this enhanced matrix is computed. The matrix enhancement results in an increased dimension of the noise subspace which thus accommodates more amount of noise component. Reassignment of the filtered pixels of the preceding patch in the current patch improves the noise filtering accuracy. The fringe denoising capability in function of the noise level and the patch size is studied. Simulation and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed method.