An Improved Quality-Guided Phase-Unwrapping Algorithm Based on Priority Queue

Phase unwrapping is one of the key problems in reconstructing the elevation map of a scene from interferometric synthetic aperture radar or interferometric synthetic aperture sonar (InSAS) data. In this letter, an improved quality-guided phase-unwrapping algorithm is proposed, which depends on the quality value and its surrounding quality information to guide the path of unwrapping more accurately. In order to design highly efficient quality-guided algorithm, a guided map deduced from the quality map is introduced and taken as the new quality map which the quality-guided algorithm should completely depend on. A quantized quality-guided method is designed, which adopts the quantized new quality map and the priority queue designed to optimize the process of unwrapping. The quantized quality map establishes the relation between the quality values and the indexes of array, which can save the time of inserting one pixel into the priority queue according to its integral quality value. Priority queue keeps all the pixels by their quantized quality in a nondecreasing order by maintaining the doubly linked lists in an increasing order. An optimized strategy is used to accelerate the process of finding the pixel with the highest quality value in the priority queue. Tests performed on real InSAS data and simulated interferograms confirm the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, and the improved algorithm is suitable for our real-time processing InSAS system.