Tangent least-squares fitting filtering method for electrical speckle pattern interferometry phase fringe patterns

An efficient method is proposed to reduce the noise from electrical speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) phase fringe patterns obtained by any technique. We establish the filtering windows along the tangent direction of phase fringe patterns. The x and y coordinates of each point in the established filtering windows are defined as the sine and cosine of the half-wrapped phase multiplied by a random quantity, then phase value is calculated using these points' coordinates based on a least-squares fitting algorithm. We tested the proposed methods on the computer-simulated speckle phase fringe patterns and the experimentally obtained phase fringe pattern, respectively, and compared them with the improved sine/cosine average filtering method [Opt. Commun. 162, 205 (1999)] and the least-squares phase-fitting method [Opt. Lett. 20, 931 (1995)], which may be the most efficient methods. In all cases, our results are even better than the ones obtained with the two methods. Our method can overcome the main disadvantages encountered by the two methods. OCIS codes: 120.6160, 100.5010, 070.6110.