A review for three-step phase-shifting algorithms

To address the issue of low accuracy of the two-step phase-shifting algorithms (PSAs) and prevent the acquisition of too many interferograms to reduce the efficiency of phase calculation, the three-step PSAs have been studied extensively. There are many types of three-step PSAs, such as difference map class (DM-C), advanced iterative algorithm, principal component analysis class (PCA-C), VU decomposition method, and so on. We select a total of 11 excellent three-step PSAs to compare their performance under different simulated conditions, phase distributions, noise levels, noise distributions, phase shifts, and fringe numbers in the simulations, and their experimental performance and computational time are also contrasted. Finally, we sort the three-step PSAs according to the performance comparison results, minimum coefficient of variation algorithm (CV) and VU factorization method are the PSAs with better comprehensive performance. Meanwhile, the future research direction is given.