Single-frame fringe pattern processing and analysis is an important task of optical interferometry, structural illumination and moiré techniques. In this contribution we present several algorithmic solutions based on the notion of Hilbert-Huang transform consisting of empirical mode decomposition algorithm and Hilbert spectral analysis. EMD adaptively dissects a meaningful number of intrinsic mode functions from the analyzed pattern. Appropriately managing this set of functions results in a powerful fringe processing tool. We describe in detail especially tailored manners proposed to extend the EMD algorithm to 2D and perform Hilbert-transform-aided efficient fringe pattern denoising, detrending and amplitude/phase demodulation.