“…It is important to clarify three points in advance. First, the iterative correction process around the critical points of Garbusi’s method is not included in this comparison; Second, the fringe direction map estimation in SPT is performed by the principal component analysis (PCA) based method proposed by Zhang and Guo in 16 , 17 ; Third, the phase sign change map for APLEF and Garbusi’s method is estimated by directly performing the phase difference calculation along the fringe orientation. Here, the fringe orientation at pixel (i, j) is simply defined as the maximum intensity difference along 1,2,3,4 in Fig.…”