Fringe pattern analysis by S-transform

Abstract S-transform proposed in 1996 by Stockwell R.G is a simple and popular technique for the time–frequency analysis. It has been introduced in optical three-dimensional shape measurement, recently. In this paper, a study about applications of S-transform in the demodulation of deformed fringe patterns is performed. We focus on discussing not only the S-transform spectrum filtering technique, the S-transform ridge technique and the phase gradient calculation method based on S-transform used in fringe pattern demodulation, but also the phase unwrapping technique. In addition, a generalized S-transform was introduced to analyze fringe patterns, which is helpful to improve the measurement accuracy and flexibility of the method based on S-transform. The reconstruction results based on S-transform were compared with that on wavelet transform and windowed Fourier transform in fringe analysis.