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The multi-frequency temporal phase unwrapping (MF-TPU) method, as a classical phase unwrapping algorithm for fringe projection profilometry (FPP), is capable of eliminating the phase ambiguities even in the presence of surface discontinuities or spatially isolated objects. For the simplest and most efficient case, two sets of 3-step phase-shifting fringe patterns are used: the high-frequency one is for 3D measurement and the unit-frequency one is for unwrapping the phase obtained from the high-frequency pattern set. The final measurement precision or sensitivity is determined by the number of fringes used within the high-frequency pattern, under the precondition that the phase can be successfully unwrapped without triggering the fringe order error. Consequently, in order to guarantee a reasonable unwrapping success rate, the fringe number (or period number) of the high-frequency fringe patterns is generally restricted to about 16, resulting in limited measurement accuracy. On the other hand, using additional intermediate sets of fringe patterns can unwrap the phase with higher frequency, but at the expense of a prolonged pattern sequence. Inspired by recent successes of deep learning techniques for computer vision and computational imaging, in this work, we report that the deep neural networks can learn to perform TPU after appropriate training, as called deep-learning based temporal phase unwrapping (DL-TPU), which can substantially improve the unwrapping reliability compared with MF-TPU. We further experimentally demonstrate for the first time, to our knowledge, that the high-frequency phase obtained from 64-period 3-step phase-shifting fringe patterns can be directly and reliably unwrapped from one unit-frequency phase using DLTPU. These results highlight that challenging issues in optical metrology can be potentially overcome through machine learning, opening new avenues to design powerful and extremely accurate high-speed 3D imaging systems ubiquitous in nowadays science, industry, and multimedia.
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