Surface contouring by phase-shifting digital holography

Surface contouring by phase-shifting digital holography is proposed that provides surface height from a change of reconstructed object phases due to the tilt of object illumination. Surface height from a reference plane is directly obtained from the phase change. Its sensitivity depends on the tilt angle as well as on the initial incident angle. By proper selection of the angles we can derive surface height without phase unwrapping. The sensitivity can be enhanced by increasing the tilt angle. Then we need phase unwrapping that is sensitive to noise due to laser speckles in the reconstructed images. This noise could be suppressed by selecting phase values at points of the maximum product of amplitudes before and after the illumination change in the course of data reduction from 1024 x 1024 to 512 x 512 and by selecting paths for phase unwrapping by looking for the intensity maximum. The observed height resolution is 20 mum. Effects of numerical focusing have also been investigated. The present method has the same sensitivity as the fringe projection method, but it has larger measurement depth and is also applicable to the deformation measurement with the same arrangement. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.