A novel generalized approach to phase-shifting interferometry in which phase distribution in an interferogram is evaluated in the presence of nonsinusoidal waveforms and piezoactuator device miscalibration is proposed. The approach is based on the underlying rotational invariance of signal subspaces spanned by two temporally displaced data sets. The advantage of the proposed method lies in its ability to identify arbitrary phase-step values pixelwise from an interference signal buried in noise. The robustness of the proposed method is investigated by addition of white Gaussian noise during the simulations. © 2005 Optical Society of America.