In phase-measuring profilometry, the lens distortion of commercial projectors may introduce additional bending carrier phase and thus lead to measurement errors. To address this problem, this paper presents an adaptive fringe projection technique in which the carrier phase in the projected fringe patterns is modified according to the projector distortion. After projecting these adaptive fringe patterns, the bending carrier phase induced by the projector distortion is eliminated. Experimental results demonstrate this method to be effective and efficient in suppressing the projector distortion for phase-measuring profilometry. More importantly, this method does not need to calibrate the projector and system parameters, such as the distortion coefficients of the projector and the angle between the optical axes of projector and camera lenses. Hence, it has low computational complexity and enables us to improve the measurement precision for an arbitrary phase-measuring profilometry system.