Adaptive multidirectional frequency domain filter for noise removal in wrapped phase patterns

Appl Opt. 2016 Aug 1;55(22):5953-9. doi: 10.1364/AO.55.005953.

Abstract

In order to avoid the detrimental effects of excessive noise in the phase fringe patterns of a laser digital interferometer over the accuracy of phase unwrapping and the successful detection of mechanical fatigue defects, an effective method of adaptive multidirectional frequency domain filtering is introduced based on the characteristics of the energy spectrum of localized wrapped phase patterns. Not only can this method automatically set the cutoff frequency, but it can also effectively filter out noise while preserving the image edge information. Compared with the sine and cosine transform filtering and the multidirectional frequency domain filtering, the experimental results demonstrate that the image filtered by our method has the fewest number of residues and is the closest to the noise-free image, compared to the two aforementioned methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of this adaptive multidirectional frequency domain filter.