Dynamic phase measurement in shearography by clustering method and Fourier filtering

Quantitative phase extraction is a key step in optical measurement. While phase shifting technique is widely employed for static or semi-static phase measurement, it requires several images with known phase shifts at each deformed stage, thus is not suitable for dynamic phase measurement. Fourier transform offer a solution to extract phase information from a single fringe pattern. However, a high frequency spatial carrier which is sometimes not easy to generate is required to solve the phase ambiguity problem. In this paper, we aim to propose an ideal solution for dynamic phase measurement. Four images with known phase shift are captured at the reference stage to analyze the initial phase information. After the object starts continuous deformation, only one image is captured at each deformed stage. A clustering phase extraction method is then applied for deformation phase extraction utilizing the phase clustering effect within a small region. This method works well for speckle image with low and medium fringe density. When the fringe density is high, especially in the case of shearographic fringe, information insufficiency inherent with merely one deformed speckle image often results in poor quality wrapped phase map with plenty of phase residues, which make phase unwrapping a difficult task. In the light of this limitation, a Fourier transform based phase filtering method is proposed for fringe frequency analysis and adaptive filtering, and effectively removes most of the phase residues to reconstruct a high quality wrapped phase map. Several real experiments based on shearography are presented. Comparison between the proposed solution and standard phase evaluation methods is also given. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed integrated dynamic phase extraction method. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America