Center positioning of circular interference fringe patterns for fine measurement

A kind of center positioning method of the circular interference fringe patterns was reported in this paper. The whole process was programmed by Matlab for processing the gray-scale images without denoising preprocessing and binary format transformation. The gradient vector field (GVF) based on a complex-valued cost function was used to extract the skeletons of circular interference fringe patterns, and the coordinate of the center was calculated by statistical method in which partial skeletons were selected to calculate the center according to the space topological relationship. Finally, subpixel accuracy and perfect anti-noise ability of the proposed method are demonstrated by the simulation and experimental fringe patterns, respectively. Thus the technique can be used in precision measurement and fine interferometry.