An effective method in calibrating nonlinear errors for phase-shifting interferometry

In phase measurement or digital holography for phase-shifting interferometry, the key role is the variation of reference light wave and recover algorithm based on interferograms and reference phase, so the calculation result is directly affected by phase-shift accuracy. However, because of the errors of nonlinear and other random factors, it is difficult to control the actual phase-shifting amount accurately. In this paper, we aim to propose an efficient method for phase-shifting interferometry which does not require accurate initial estimation of phase-shift amounts, only a few pixels with several randomly shifted interferograms are sufficient for accurate extraction of phase information. This method has reduced the dependence of reference phase, and can obtain phase-shifting amount directly without using complex revised algorithm for correcting phase-shifting nonlinear errors.