Noise in phase shifting interferometry

Abstract

We present a theoretical analysis to estimate the amount of phase noise due to noisy interferograms in Phase Shifting Interferometry (PSI). We also analyze the fact that linear filtering transforms corrupting multiplicative noise in Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry (ESPI) into fringes corrupted by additive gaussian noise. This fact allow us to obtain a formula to estimate the standard deviation of the noisy demodulated phase as a function of the spectral response of the preprocessing spatial filtering combined with the PSI algorithm used. This phase noise power formula is the main result of this contribution.