Local frequency and envelope estimation by Teager-Kaiser energy operators in white-light scanning interferometry

In this work, a new method for surface extraction in white light scanning interferometry (WLSI) is introduced. The proposed extraction scheme is based on the Teager-Kaiser energy operator and its extended versions. This non-linear class of operators is helpful to extract the local instantaneous envelope and frequency of any narrow band AM-FM signal. Namely, the combination of the envelope and frequency information, allows effective surface extraction by an iterative re-estimation of the phase in association with a new correlation technique, based on a recent TK cross-energy operator. Through the experiments, it is shown that the proposed method produces substantially effective results in term of surface extraction compared to the peak fringe scanning technique, the five step phase shifting algorithm and the continuous wavelet transform based method. In addition, the results obtained show the robustness of the proposed method to noise and to the fluctuations of the carrier frequency.