A Discrete/Continuous Minimization Method in Interferometric Image Processing
EMMCVPR '01 Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Interferogram phase evaluation through a differential equation technique
Computers and Electrical Engineering
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
We present a block least-squares (BLS) method for two-dimensional (2-D) phase unwrapping. The method works by tessellating the input image into small square blocks with only one phase wrap. These blocks are unwrapped using a simple procedure, and the unwrapped blocks are merged together using one of two proposed block merging algorithms. By specifying a suitable mask, the method can easily handle objects of any shape. This approach is compared with the Ghiglia-Romero (1994) method and the Marroquin-Rivera (1995) method. On synthetic images with different noise levels, the BLS method is shown to be superior, both with respect to the resulting gray values in the unwrapped image as well as visual inspection. The method is also shown to successfully unwrap synthetic and real images with shears, fiber-optic interferometry images, and medical magnetic resonance images. We believe the new method has the potential to improve the present quality of phase unwrapped images of several different image modalities