A virtual phase calibrating model plane method for the coordinate calibration in grating projection profilometry is presented.Plane (X-axis and Y-axis) calibration and height (Z-axis) calibration are studied respectively.The virtual phase calibrating model plane is designed to calibrate the plane coordinates.Experiment results show that the proposed calibration procedure using the virtual phase calibrating model plane method is more efficient in that it needs only one series of images of reference plane,whereas the traditional calibration method requires at least two kinds of calibrating model planes and two series of images.And the calibration error of X-axis and Y-axis is only 0.1 mm and 0.2 mm respectively,and the calibration error and standard deviation of height(Z-axis) is not more than 0.20 mm and 0.040 mm respectively.