2-D Phase Unwrapping Using Minimum Infinity-Norm

Abstract

2-D phase unwrapping (PU) is a critical image processing step in many interferometric measurement technologies. To avoid the discontinuous phase gradient error spreading from the noisy region to the high-quality region of input interferogram, a skillful PU method should keep the congruency between input phase fringes and rewrapped phase fringes of the PU result as much as possible. However, traditional PU methods often fail in case input interferogram contains “bad” regions, in which the phase information should not be trusted. Under this condition, it is desired that the PU method instinctively keeps the fringe-congruency in the high-quality area and reasonably modifies the input phase fringes in the low quality area. In other words, the PU method with an extra adaptive filtering function would be preferred in practice. Based on this perspective, a novel minimum infinity-norm-based PU method, referred to MIN, is proposed in this letter. Both theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate that the MIN method is an effective PU method.