Phase shifting in the spatial frequency domain

We present a simple mathematical method for phase shifting that overcomes some phase shift errors and limitations of commonly used methods. The method is used to generate a sequence of phase-shifted interferograms from a single interferogram. The generated interferograms are employed to reconstruct the wavefront aberrations, as an application. The approach yields results with only very small deviations compared to both simulated wavefront aberrations, including the first 25 Zernike polynomials (0.05%) and those measured with a Shack-Hartmann sensor (0.5%).