Revelations in the Art of Fringe Counting: The State of the Art in Distance Measuring Interferometry

The ancestral roots of the Fringe conference are in the automatic processing of fringe patterns. When we think of patterns, an image comes to mind of flowing lines beautifully wrapped around surface contours. But automatic processing of fringes is not limited to this kind of pattern: The fringes may be laid out along a line of sight as the time history of an object displacement, captured by a detector and processed to tell us something about how the object has moved, or more generally, where the object is with respect to a reference point in space.