Half-Period Gray-Level Coding Strategy for Absolute Phase Retrieval

N-ary gray-level (nGL) coding strategy is an effective method for absolute phase retrieval in the fringe projection technique. However, the conventional nGL method contains many unwrapping errors at the boundaries of codewords. In addition, the number of codewords is limited in only one pattern. Consequently, this paper proposes a new gray-level coding method based on half-period coding, which can improve both these two deficiencies. Specifically, we embed every period with a 2-bit codeword, instead of a 1-bit codeword. Then, special correction and decoding methods are proposed to correct the codewords and calculate the fringe orders, respectively. The proposed method can generate n2 codewords with n gray levels in one pattern. Moreover, this method is insensitive to moderate image blurring. Various experiments demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed strategy.