The Principle of the Argument is applied to test the stability of a 2-D recursive filter with denominator B(Z
1,Z
2). This approach to stability testing leads to an efficient numerical implementation requiring only the computation of a 2-D DFT, followed by phase unwrapping and a search for zeros of

. In the absence of zeros of

, stability is assured if B(Z
1,1) and B(1,z
2) are both minimum phase.