N-dimensional regularized fringe direction-estimator

It has been demonstrated that the vectorial fringe-direction field is very important to demodulate fringe patterns without a dominant (or carrier) frequency. Unfortunately, the computation of this direction-filed is by far the most difficult task in the full interferogram phase-demodulation process. In this paper we present an algorithm to estimate this fringe-direction vector-field of a single n-dimensional fringe pattern. Despite that our theoretical results are valid at any dimension in the Euclidean space, we present some computer-simulated results in three dimensions because it is the most useful case in practical applications. As herein demonstrated, our method is based on linear matrix and vector analysis, this translates into a low computational cost.