Phase unwrapping using a regular mesh grid

Abstract

Phase unwrapping is a key step in the fringe pattern analysis. Although there are many algorithms for recovering continuous phase from wrapped phase maps, many of them are computationaly heavy, even for smooth phase maps. The smoothness characteristics of a phase map allow the use of radial basis functions to model the unwrapped phase. This method helps to reduce the processing time when unwrapping the phase. The processing time can be reduced even more when the reconstruction does not take into account all the pixels of the phase map image. In this paper we describe an algorithm for phase unwrapping where the phase map is reconstructed from a subset of pixels of the phase image using radial basis functions (RBFs). The proposed method is compared with the algorithm based on the same radial basis functions (RBFs) but using all the phase image pixels.