Method for suppressing the quantization error of Newton’s rings fringe pattern

Abstract

Newton’s rings fringe pattern is often encountered in optical measurement. The digital processing of the fringe pattern is widely used to enable automatic analysis and improve the accuracy and flexibility. Before digital processing, sampling and quantization are necessary, which introduce quantization errors in the fringe pattern. Quantization errors are always analyzed and suppressed in the Fourier transform (FT) domain. But Newton’s rings fringe pattern is demonstrated to be a two-dimensional chirp signal, and the traditional methods based on the FT domain are not efficient when suppressing quantization errors in such signals with large bandwidth as chirp signals. This paper proposes a method for suppressing quantization errors in the fractional Fourier transform (FRFT) domain, for chirp signals occupies little bandwidth in the FRFT domain. This method has better effect on reduction of quantization errors in the fringe pattern than traditional methods. As an example, a standard Newton’s rings fringe pattern is analyzed in the FRFT domain and then 8.5 dB of improvement in signal-to-quantization-noise ratio and about 1.4 bits of increase in accuracy are obtained compared to the case of the FT domain. Consequently, the image quality of Newton’s rings fringe pattern is improved, which is beneficial to optical metrology.