Abstract
Shadow moire topography has been used as a noncontact method for measuring the 3-D shapes of objects. The moire fringes are results from the superposition of a master grating and its shadow projected on the surface of an object. But in case of the classical shadow moire method, in general, the resolution is a few tenths of millimeter. It is difficult to use a phase -shifting method in shadow moire because it is impossible to obtain uniform phase shifts on the whole field. But in this study , We introduce a phase-shifting method to improve the resolution of the classical shadow moire method. This method is based on the fact that if the depth of object is much less than the distance between the observer and the master grating, the phase shifts are almost uniform on the whole field area. Finally, we applied this new phase-shifting method to the measurement of the 3-D shape of a coin.