Fringe patterns from optical metrology systems need to be demodulated to get the desired parameters. Two-dimensional windowed Fourier transform is chosen for the determination of phase and phase derivatives. Two algorithms, one based on filtering and the other based on similarity measure, are developed. Some applications based on these two algorithms are explored, including strain determination, phase unwrapping, phase-shifter calibration, fault detection, edge detection and fringe segmentation. Various examples are given to demonstrate the ideas. Finally implementations of these algorithms are addressed. Most of the work has appeared in various papers and its originality is not claimed. Instead, this paper gives an overview and more insights of our work on windowed Fourier transform. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.