Deformed fringes often contain low fre quency information degraded with random noise and background intensity informati on in structured light projection of three-dimensional surface shape measuremen t. In order to get fundamental frequency component of the tested object height info rmation,the random noise and background intensity information need to be removed.A 3D shape measurement metho d is proposed based on 2D empirical mode decomposition (2D-EMD).Because 2D-EMD method has noise reductio n in a way,at the same time,we remove the background components.The rest of fundamental signals are per formed by 2D Hilbert transform to effectively obtain the necessary phase informa tion in 3D shape measurement.Then according to the mapping relationship of phase and height,we can get the three-dimensional shape of the tested object.Because 2D-EMD method is a complete two dimensional analysis method,considering the fringe p attern of the relationship between the line and the line,the modulation phase of a ny direction fringe pattern can be effectively extracted.Without adding noise re peatedly like ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD,the data operating ti me is shortened.Computer simulations show that the larger steep jump error is dr opped from －40mm to －1-1mm compared with the Fourier transform technique.Ex periment proves the feasibility of this method.