Phase Unwrapping via Graph Cuts

Phase unwrapping is the inference of absolute phase from modulo-2pi phase. This paper introduces a new energy minimization framework for phase unwrapping. The considered objective functions are first-order Markov random fields. We provide an exact energy minimization algorithm, whenever the corresponding clique potentials are convex, namely for the phase unwrapping classical Lp norm, with pges1. Its complexity is KT(n,3n), where K is the length of the absolute phase domain measured in 2pi units and T(n,m) is the complexity of a max-flow computation in a graph with n nodes and m edges. For nonconvex clique potentials, often used owing to their discontinuity preserving ability, we face an NP-hard problem for which we devise an approximate solution. Both algorithms solve integer optimization problems by computing a sequence of binary optimizations, each one solved by graph cut techniques. Accordingly, we name the two algorithms PUMA, for phase unwrapping max-flow/min-cut. A set of experimental results illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its competitiveness in comparison with state-of-the-art phase unwrapping algorithms