Robust fringe density and direction estimation in noisy phase maps

A method for automated fringe analysis is presented. It robustly estimates local fringe density and direction in noisy wrapped phase maps. Such information can be used to improve the performance of two-dimensional phase unwrapping methods, to construct phase-jump-preserving filtering strategies, and also to perform robust segmentation of phase data. The method, which is highly insensitive to noise, is model based and performs the estimation in the Fourier domain.