An anisotropic evolution formulation applied in 2-D unwrapping of discontinuous phase surfaces

In this paper, a new method to reconstruct piecewise continuous phase estimates using inphase and quadrature components acquired from interferometry measurements is derived and discussed. The method, based on the concept of anisotropic evolution formulations, is shown to be far less noise sensitive than similar methods operating on modulo-mapped data (i.e., traditional phase unwrapping methods). The method is able to produce reliable phase estimates from data containing complex sheared structures in combination with high noise content without relying on user-defined weights.