Phase unwrapping using discontinuity optimization

In SAR interferometry, the periodicity of the phase must be removed using two-dimensional phase unwrapping. The goal of the procedure is to find a smooth surface in which large spatial phase differences, called discontinuities, are restricted to places where their presence is reasonable. The pioneering work of Goldstein et al. identified points of local unwrap inconsistency called residues, which must be connected by discontinuities. This paper presents an overview of recent work that treats phase unwrapping as a discrete optimization problem with the constraint that residues must be connected. Several algorithms use heuristic methods to reduce the total number of discontinuities. Constantini has introduced the weighted sum of discontinuity magnitudes as a criterion of unwrap error and shown how algorithms from optimization theory are used to minimize it. Pixels of low quality are given low weight to guide discontinuities away from smooth, high-quality regions. This method is generally robust, but if noise is severe it underestimates the steepness of slopes and the heights of peaks. This problem is mitigated by subtracting (module 2/spl pi/) a smooth estimate of the unwrapped phase from the data, then unwrapping the resulting residual phase. The unwrapped residual is added to the smooth estimate to produce the final unwrapped phase. The estimate can be computed by lowpass filtering of an existing unwrapped phase; this makes possible an iterative algorithm in which the result of each iteration provides the estimate for the next. An example illustrates the results of optimal discontinuity placement and the improvement from unwrapping of the residual phase.