To achieve the requirement for a real reference surface in regular three-dimensional(3D) shape measurement based on fringe reflection technique,a novel method of virtual reference surface is proposed.A marked checkerboard image is projected onto a flat mirror at the stage of system calibration and the virtual image plane on the other side of the mirror is defined as the virtual reference surface.The reference phase distribution can be calculated directly through the corresponding relationship between the points on the virtual reference surface and the phase distribution on the encoded fringe patterns.Thus the procedure of phase extraction on the real reference surface can be avoided before the measurement of the high-reflected parts.Results show that with this method,the three dimensional shape of the high-reflected surface can be obtained fast and precisely compared with regular fringe reflection method.The detection efficiency has been improved and the measurement complexity can be reduced.The measurement equipment is built and fringe reflection method based on virtual reference surface is adopted to recover the three dimensional shapes of an ultra-precise mirror and a combination step.By establishing the relationship between the phase deflection and the slope distribution on the measured parts,the topography can be reconstructed by the slope information and the measurement accuracy can reach 50 μm approximately.