When measuring the form deviation of the gear tooth flank with laser interferometry,
due to the limitation of the depth of field of the lens, focused and
defocused regions exist in the interferogram simultaneously. The
introduced errors that were generated by these defocused regions
decrease the measurement accuracy. Therefore, the evaluation of
definition for interferograms is necessary for image processing.
However, the gradient of gray, which performs by fringes, makes it
difficult for traditional algorithms to evaluate its definition. This
paper proposes a method based on nonsubsampled contourlet
transformation (NSCT) combined with fringe direction as weighting
coefficients to solve the problem. First, the information about the
directions of these fringes in interferograms was evaluated. Then, the
NSCT method was applied to interferograms so that several sub-images
in different scales and directions can be achieved. Based on these
sub-images and directions information, an improved function for
definition evaluation was conducted. Lastly, a series of simulations
and experiments was carried out to verify its feasibility and
accuracy.