A robust approach to demodulating and unwrapping phase-stepped photoelastic data

摘要

New algorithms are proposed for processing wrapped isochromatic and isoclinic fringe data generated by the digital photoelastic technique of phase-stepping. The new algorithms are based on processing areas rather than individual pixels to demodulate the data and employing quality assessments of the data to guide the unwrapping procedure. Comparisons with an existing algorithm, manual analysis, and finite element modeling have been used to demonstrate that the new approach is more robust without any reduction in speed or accuracy. This represents a significant advance for processing complex fringe patterns, which are often encountered in the aerospace industry from which the exemplars are drawn.