Evaluation of the implicit smoothing splines algorithm for the interferometric fringe pattern phase retrieval

We discuss a recently proposed method of the implicit smoothing splines in the context of the interferometric fringe pattern processing. The algorithm extends classic smoothing spline method to the case of the measurements being in some non-trivial functional relation to the estimated distribution, i.e., to the case of the implicitly given data. This is the case of the phase estimation based on the intensity of the related fringe pattern. While there are certain preprocessing complications involved in the application of the implicit smoothing splines, the method offers very accurate continuous (unwrapped) phase estimation and outperforms well-established fringe pattern analysis tools. In this paper we present theoretical background of the implicit smoothing splines as well as numerical results related to their application to the fringe pattern phase estimation problem.