Windowed phase unwrapping using a first-order dynamic system following iso-phase contours

Abstract

In this work, we show a windowed phase-unwrapping technique that uses a first-order dynamic system and scans the phase following its iso-phase contours. In previous works, we have shown that low-pass first-order dynamic systems are very robust and useful in phase-unwrapping problems. However, it is well known that all phase-unwrapping methods have a minimum signal-to-noise ratio that they tolerate. This paper shows that scanning the phase within local windows and using a path following strategy, the first-order unwrapping method increases its tolerance to noise. In this way, using the improved approach, we can unwrap phase maps where the basic dynamic phase-unwrapping system fails. Tests and results are given, as well as the source code in order to show the performance of the proposed method. © 2012 Optical Society of America.