Residual stresses in glass causes it birefringent, affecting its optical properties. Annealed P-LASF47%trade; glass plates of 75 × 20 × 5 mm are subjected to two different thermal cycles. An automatic polariscope is used to employ Phase Shifting Technique (PST) to determine the residual integrated retardations over the thickness. Smaller field of view of the polariscope necessitates analysing the glass plate separately for the upper and lower regions of the glass plate. A code is developed in MATLAB to stitch the retardation data for the upper and lower region. The integrated retardation for the whole field is plotted as a contour plot using OriginPro software. Maximum retardation is observed in small regions at the free surfaces of the glass plate. It is noted that the nature of the thermal cycle has an influence on the retardation distribution. © 2014 SPIE.