Due to the nonlinearity in phase shifting profilometry (PSP) system, the captured images are often distorted with fringe harmonics, resulting in inaccurate phase map and measurement. Considering the fact that the phase error can be significantly reduced by modeling high-order fringe harmonics, this work formulates the phase extraction problem - with different frequency images and high-order fringe harmonic model - as a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). To optimize it efficiently, we thus propose a combined-frequency phase extraction (CFPE) solution by introducing a latent phase map and incorporating the famous expectation-maximization (EM) framework. As a result, our CFPE method only needs ∼5% execution time of a high-order baseline, whilst keeps the high-order accuracy. Tested on synthetic images as well as practical measurements, our CFPE method demonstrated its performance improvement of efficiency and accuracy. In addition, our detailed implementation with experimental arrangement is also provided for interested researchers.