Compression of phase image for three-dimensional object

We present the performances of compression analysis for the phase image resulted from different phase unwrapping algorithms applied to fringe projection profilometry. Since three-dimensional (3D) surface shape information of objects can be extracted from the phase maps of objects, the phase unwrapping is critical to many 3D applications for obtaining accurate phase. To reduce the size of storage and processing for 3D data, these phase images are fed to the compression algorithms. The efficiency is evaluated and compared with compression ratio and normalized root mean square (NRMS) error. Our simulation and experimental results show that the H.264/AVC codec method can maintain low NRMS error while with higher compression ratio than the other methods investigated in this paper.