Edge preserving phase unwrapping using graph cuts

This paper addresses the problem of recovering the absolute phase from modulo-2π phase, the so-called phase unwrapping (PU) problem. PU is a key step in several imaging technologies, namely, interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), and interferometric synthetic aperture sonar (InSAS). There, the topographic information is encoded in the phase of a complex valued image with a (different) multiple 2π ambiguity on each pixel. Some kind of PU procedure must then be employed to find the actual absolute phase and, from there, the desired topographic data. We establish a phase unwrapping algorithm, in the vein of the minimization of the L norm of phase differences, that is similar to our previous one published in [1]; the main contribution of this paper is to bring in adaptive edge preservation to the original surface recovering. A set of experimental results illustrates the effectiveness of the algorithm.