Absolute phase recovery with multiple-wavelength fringes

In a recent work, a technique was proposed to recover the absolute phase maps of fringe patterns with two or three selected fringe wavelengths with the aim to improve anti-error capability. To further increase the anti-error capability associated with the phase unwrapping operation, multiple fringe patterns with different wavelengths may also be used. In this paper, we present a general rule to select the wavelengths and the strategy to increase phase error tolerance bound. Based on this rule, it is concluded that to maximize the error tolerance, four-wavelength method should be selected, where the maximum upper bound of the tolerable phase error is π/6. To minimize the required number of fringe patterns, three-wavelength method with three-step PSP should be selected, that is exactly the case the previous paper has demonstrated. These theoretical conclusions are verified by experimental results.