Application of the radial basis function interpolation to phase extraction from a single electronic speckle pattern interferometric fringe

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the radial basis function (RBF) interpolation method to electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) and propose the RBF interpolation method to obtain unwrapped phase values based on a skeleton map. Because of the excellent approximation properties of the RBF interpolation, the proposed method can extract accurate phase values from a single fringe pattern effectively, even using a simple 3×3 mean filter as preprocessing. Using our method, both special filtering methods for ESPI fringes as preprocessing and postprocessing, including a dilatation and erosion algorithm for pruning and connecting and the smooth algorithm for improving the phase values are not needed. We test our method on a computer-simulated and two experimentally obtained poor-quality fringe patterns. The results have demonstrated that our RBF interpolation method works well even under a seriously disconnected skeleton map where it is impossible to apply the widely used, Matlab function grid data interpolation or the backpropagation neural networks method [Appl. Opt. 46, 7475 (2007)].