Unfolding wrapped phase

Phase unwrapping is the final step in phase extraction methods, which consists of recovering the correct phase from the wrapped phase by removing 2 pi discontinuities. The difference between the correct phase and the wrapped phase is the phase wrapping map. A new method for phase unwrapping is presented by identifying the phase wrapping map as a sequence of binary valued intermediate wrapping maps and iteratively removing them producing the correct phase by phase-wrapped unfolding. A path-following algorithm is presented to exemplify the phase wrapped unfolding method. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.