Quadrature phase-shifting interferometer with a polarization imaging camera

We present a new high-speed phase distribution measurement, in which a polarization imaging camera is applied to a quadrature phase-shifting interferometer. The polarization imaging camera composed of a polarizer-mask on a detector array can provide simultaneously two phase-shifted data in quadrature. Two sets of two phase-shifted data in quadrature are obtained before and after a change of the interferometer such as object displacement or environmental disturbances. Phase sum and difference distributions of the interferograms between two states with arbitrary phase-shift in the interferometer are calculated with the two sets of two phase-shifted data in quadrature. This phase calculation method in the pixel displaced phase-shift method has such advantage that phase-shifted data required for the calculation of phase distributions can be obtained by only two pixels in the polarizer-mask detector array, which means no reduction of the image resolution in the other direction. The principle of this technique and experimental results are presented.