Reducing the number of images in fringe projection profilometry has emerged as a significant research focus. Traditional temporal phase unwrapping algorithms typically require an additional set of coding fringe or phase shift fringe images to determine the fringe order and facilitate phase unwrapping, in addition to the essential sinusoidal phase shift fringe for calculating the wrapped phase. In order to reduce the required number of fringe images and increase reconstruction speed, this paper proposes a three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction method inspired by spatial phase unwrapping. The proposed method is based on the N-step temporal phase unwrapping algorithm and can solve the wrapped phase and fringe order using only a set of sinusoidal phase shift fringe images. Our method achieves a further reduction in the required number of images without compromising reconstruction accuracy. In the calculation of the absolute phase, our proposed method only requires an N-step standard phase shift sinusoidal fringe image, eliminating the need for additional fringe images to determine the fringe order. Firstly, we employ the standard N-step phase shift algorithm to compute the wrapped phase and apply a mask for background removal. Next, we directly calculate the fringe order using the wrapped phase and mask and solve for the absolute phase based on the connected region labeling theorem. Our method achieves 3D reconstruction using a minimum of three fringe images, while maintaining reconstruction precision comparable to that of the traditional temporal phase unwrapping technique. As no additional fringe image is required to solve the fringe order, our method has the potential to achieve significantly faster reconstruction speed.