Parallel phase unwrapping in 3D shape measurement using digital fringe projection technique

Phase unwrapping is used to get absolute phase from the wrapped phase image and remove 2π discontinuities. It is computational extensive process. It requires a lot of iterations, first in one dimension of the image and then in the other dimension, to unwrap the phase. The primary limitation of the phase unwrapping is that it is a path dependant process which can only be executed sequentially. In this paper we have developed a new method for the parallel processing of path dependant phase unwrapping. In this proposed method different blocks of image are executed parallely by separate threads independent of each other. The algorithm used in this paper is Itoh for phase unwrapping. The results achieved by parallel processing of phase unwrapping are 99% better as compared to the sequential processing.