Multilevel two-dimensional phase unwrapping

Irad Yavneh

Department of Computer Science
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Haifa 32000, Israel

Iddit Shalem


Abstract

Two-dimensional phase unwrapping is the problem of deducing unambiguous "phase" from values known only modulo $2\pi$. Many authors agree that the objective of phase unwrapping should be to find a weighted minimum of the number of places where adjacent (discrete) phase values differ by more than $\pi$. This NP-hard problem is of considerable practical interest, largely due to its importance in interpreting data acquired with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry. Consequently, many heuristic algorithms have been proposed. In this talk we shall present a novel multi-level graph algorithm for the approximate solution of this problem via an equivalent problem: minimal residue cut in the dual graph.