Examination of the upper measurement limit in displacement measurement using fringe compensation in digital holography

Abstract Digital holography is a widely used method for displacement measurement in coherent optical metrology. An obvious limit of the method is that too large displacements result in dense fringes, so the fringes are practically invisible. The maximum number of contour fringes in displacement measurement is limited, because the cameras are discrete devices and sampling theory plays an important role. Because of the limited measurement range, compensation methods are promising tools for practical measurements. It can be shown that the practical measurement range can be extended above the Nyquist sampling limit. Compensation methods can be digital, because digital holographic interferometry operates with images recorded with a digital camera. In our research work the upper measurement range of fringe compensation method was examined. Our goal was to perform automatic compensation even if the displacement is higher than the measurement range of the basic method. The operation of the automatic fringe compensation method was based on the combination of two types of out-of-plane displacement measurements with different sensitivities.