Optical interferometry provides high-precision displacement and angle measurement solutions for a wide range of cutting-edge industrial applications. One of the key factors to achieve such precision lies in highly accurate optical encoder signal processing, as well as the calibration and compensation techniques customized for specific measurement principles. Optical interferometric techniques, including laser interferometry and grating interferometry, are usually classified into homodyne and heterodyne systems according to their working principles. In homodyne interferometry, the displacement is determined by analyzing the phase variation of amplitude-modulated signals, and common demodulation methods include error calibration methods and ellipse parameter estimation methods. Heterodyne interferometry obtains displacement information through the phase variation of beat-frequency signals generated by the interference of two light beams with shifted frequencies, and its demodulation techniques include pulse-counting methods, quadrature phase-locked methods, and Kalman filtering. This paper comprehensively reviews the widely used signal processing techniques in optical interferometric measurements over the past two decades and conducts a comparative analysis based on the characteristics of different methods to highlight their respective advantages and limitations. Finally, the hardware platforms commonly used for optical interference signal processing are introduced.
Wang et al. (2025) studied this question.