Wavefront reconstruction in phase-shifting interferometry via sparse coding of amplitude and absolute phase

Phase-shifting interferometry is a coherent optical method that combines high accuracy with high measurement speeds. This technique is therefore desirable in many applications such as the efficient industrial quality inspection process. However, despite its advantageous properties, the inference of the object amplitude and the phase, herein termed wavefront reconstruction, is not a trivial task owing to the Poissonian noise associated with the measurement process and to the 2π phase periodicity of the observation mechanism. In this paper, we formulate the wavefront reconstruction as an inverse problem, where the amplitude and the absolute phase are assumed to admit sparse linear representations in suitable sparsifying transforms (dictionaries). Sparse modeling is a form of regularization of inverse problems which, in the case of the absolute phase, is not available to the conventional wavefront reconstruction techniques, as only interferometric phase modulo-2π is considered therein. The developed sparse modeling of the absolute phase solves two different problems: accuracy of the interferometric (wrapped) phase reconstruction and simultaneous phase unwrapping. Based on this rationale, we introduce the sparse phase and amplitude reconstruction (SPAR) algorithm. SPAR takes into full consideration the Poissonian (photon counting) measurements and uses the data-adaptive block-matching 3D (BM3D) frames as a sparse representation for the amplitude and for the absolute phase. SPAR effectiveness is documented by comparing its performance with that of competitors in a series of experiments.