Determination of interferometer phase distributions by use of wavelets

A new technique for directly extracting phase gradients from two-dimensiona l (2-D) interferometer fringe data is presented. One finds the gradients by tracking the maximum modulus of the continuous wavelet transform of the fr inge data and the phase distribution that is obtained, with a small error, by integration. Problems associated with phase unwrapping are thereby avoid ed. The technique is compared with standard methods, and excellent agreemen t is found. In common with Fourier-transform methods, the technique is capa ble of extracting the full 2-D phase distribution from a single image. (C) 1999 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 100.7410, 100.5070, 100.2650, 1 20.3180.