Absolute phase recovery of three fringe patterns with selected spatial frequencies

•A new three-frequency technique is proposed to unwrap the phase maps.•Reliability of absolute phase is enhanced by new frequency selection strategy.•Tolerance bound of wrapped phase error of proposed method is obtained.

A new temporal approach is presented for the recovery of the absolute phase maps from their wrapped versions based on the use of fringe patterns of three different spatial frequencies. In contrast to the two-frequency method recently published, the method proposed is characterized by better anti-error capability as measured by phase error tolerance bound. A general rule for the selection of the three frequencies is presented, and its relationship to the phase error tolerance bound is derived. Theoretical analysis and experimental results are also presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed three frequency technique.