Robust two-dimensional weighted and unweighted phase unwrapping that uses fast transforms and iterative methods

Two-dimensional (2D) phase unwrapping continues to find applications in a wide variety of scientific and engineering areas including optical and microwave interferometry, adaptive optics, compensated imaging, and synthetic-aperture-radar phase correction, and image processing. We have developed a robust method (not based on any path-following scheme) for unwrapping 2D phase principal values (in a least-squares sense) by using fast cosine transforms. If the 2D phase values are associated with a 2D weighting, the fast transforms can still be used in iterative methods for solving the weighted unwrapping problem. Weighted unwrapping can be used to isolate inconsistent regions (i.e., phase shear) in an elegant fashion.