Residues Cluster-Based Segmentation and Outlier-Detection Method for Large-Scale Phase Unwrapping

2-D phase unwrapping is an important technique in many applications. However, with the growth of image scale, how to tile and splice the image effectively has become a new challenge. In this paper, the phase unwrapping problem is abstracted as solving a large-scale system of inconsistent linear equations. With the difficulties of large-scale phase unwrapping analyzed, L⁰-norm criterion is found to have potentials in efficient image tiling and splicing. Making use of the clustering characteristic of residue distribution, a tiling strategy is proposed for L⁰-norm criterion. Unfortunately, L⁰-norm is an NP-hard problem, which is very difficult to find an exact solution in a polynomial time. In order to effectively solve this problem, equations corresponding to branch cuts of L⁰-norm in the inconsistent equation system mentioned earlier are considered as outliers, and then an outlier-detection-based phase unwrapping method is proposed. Through this method, a highly accurate approximate solution to this NP-hard problem is achieved. A set of experimental results shows that the proposed approach can avoid the inconsistency between local and global phase unwrapping solutions caused by image tiling.