An improved stair phase encoding method for absolute phase retrieval

•Color fringe patterns are generated by encoding with sinusoidal fringe and stair phase fringe patterns in red and blue channels.•Two groups of four-step phase-shifting fringe patterns are separated from different channels of the obtained color fringe patterns.•The adjacent stair phase jumps are used to divide the measuring field into parts.•The proposed method effectively reduces the number of projection fringes and improves the measuring speed.

An improved phase unwrapping method is proposed to reduce the projection fringes in three-dimensional (3D) surface measurement. Color fringe patterns are generated by encoding with sinusoidal fringe and stair phase fringe patterns in red and blue channels. These color fringe patterns are projected onto the tested objects and then captured by a color CCD camera. The recorded fringe patterns are separated into their RGB components. Two groups of four-step phase-shifting fringe patterns are obtained. One group of the stripes are four sinusoidal patterns, which are used to determine the wrapped phase. The other group of stripes are four sinusoidal patterns with the codeword embedded into stair phase, whose stair changes are perfectly aligned with the 2π discontinuities of sinusoidal fringe phase, which are used to determine the fringe order for the phase unwrapping. The experimental results are analyzed and compared with those of the method in Zheng and Da (2012. Opt Express 20(22):24139–24150). The results show that the proposed method needs only four fringe patterns while having less error. It can effectively reduce the number of projection fringes and improve the measuring speed.