Digital holography (DH) which is the technology of acquiring and processing measurement data via a CCD camera is spreading to industrial applications, finds wide employment in engineering problems of testing and investigation. In this paper, a simple digital holographic system, comprising a He-Ne laser source, CCD camera and analyzing software, is used for testing surface flatness and detecting the presence of a propagating crack on the surface plane and the effect of the crack on the neighborhood. Phase variations across the surfaces planes are extracted to represent the surface deviation from a reference plane. The analysis methods differ according to the interference fringes in the recorded holograms. Both fringe tracking and Fourier transform with phase unwrapping methods are used in the interpretation of interferometric fringe patterns.

The present work offers new equations for phase evaluation in measurements. Several phase-shifting equations with an arbitrary but constant phase-shift between captured intensity signs are proposed. The equations are similarly derived as the so called Carré equation. The idea is to develop a generalization of the Carré equation that is not restricted to four images. Errors and random noise in the images cannot be eliminated, but the uncertainty due to their effects can be reduced by increasing the number of observations. An experimental analysis of the errors of the technique was made, as well as a detailed analysis of errors of the measurement. The advantages of the proposed equation are its precision in the measures taken, speed of processing and the immunity to noise in signs and images.