A four-frame phase shift method insensitive to phase shifter nonlinearity

A four-frame phase shift method and an associated algorithm using unequal phase steps are presented. The unique advantage of this method is that it becomes insensitive to phase shifter nonlinearity because of the performance of a special procedure, in which the phase shifts are shared out between the reference beam and the object beam. By this means, any phase shifter can work as long as one phase shift is accurately known. On the basis of the technique, a simple calibration method for the linear phase shifter is suggested. The influences of phase shifter miscalibration, detector nonlinearity and random noise on the algorithm are investigated, and the optimal phase shifts are given.