Comparison of phase recovery methods in spiral speckle pattern interferometry correlation fringes

Spiral interferometry can be used as a solution to the problem of sign ambiguity presented in the conventional speckle pattern interferometric technique when the optical phase needs to be reconstructed from a single closed fringe system. Depressions and elevations of the topography corresponding to the object deformation are distinguished by the direction of rotation of the local spiral fringe pattern. In this work, we implement and compare several methods for optical phase reconstruction by analyzing a single image composed of spiral speckle pattern interferometry correlation fringes. The implemented methods are based on contour line demodulation, center line demodulation, Spiral Phase Quadrature Transform and the 2D Riesz transform with multivector structure. Contour line and center line demodulation approaches are exclusively dedicated to images containing a fringe system with spiral structure. The others are based on the 2D Riesz transform, these being well known approaches in conventional interferometry. We examine simulated experiments and analyze some of the emerging drawbacks for solving the phase reconstruction problem by using different mean values of speckle size and background noise levels. We also discuss several numerical procedures that may well improve the efficiency and robustness of the presented numerical implementations. The performance of the implemented demodulation methods is evaluated by using a universal image quality index and therefore a quantitative comparison is also presented. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.