A novel phase-shifting profilometry to realize temporal phase unwrapping simultaneously with the least fringe patterns

•A method that ingeniously combines PSP and TPU is proposed, which can measure discontinuous surfaces or multiple isolated objects with TPU, while ensuring measurement accuracy with PSP.•While realizing PSP and TPU, no additional structure pattern is need to realize full field phase unwrapping, and the number of fringe patterns is controlled to the minimum number of three.•The π phase shifted fringe patterns are constructed to filter the background light skillfully.•The proposed method can be employed in real-time 3D measurement of measurement objects.•Few patterns can speed up the data processing and simplify the measurement process of the 3D shape, and have potential application prospect in dynamic 3D measurement.