Estimation of fringe orientation for optical fringe patterns with poor quality based on Fourier transform

Fringe orientation represents an important property of fringes. The estimation of orientation from a poor quality fringe image is still a challenging problem faced in this area. This paper introduces a new approach for estimating optical fringe orientation with a poor quality image. This approach is based on the power spectrum analysis of the Fourier transform. We evaluate the performance of this algorithm via application to a variety of test cases and comparison with the widely used gradient-based method and accumulate-differences method. The experimental results show that our method is capable of calculating fringe orientation robustly even when the quality of fringe images is considerably low because of high or low density, high noise, and low contrast. Under the same conditions, our accuracy is even better than that obtained with the gradient-based and accumulate-differences methods, especially for fringe images with poor quality.