DOI: 10.7155/jgaa.00121
A Factor-Two Approximation Algorithm for Two-Dimensional Phase Unwrapping
Reuven Bar-Yehuda and Irad Yavneh
Vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 123-139, 2006. Regular paper

Abstract Two-dimensional phase unwrapping is the problem of deducing unambiguous "phase" from values known only modulo 2π. Many authors agree that the objective of phase unwrapping should be to find a (weighted) minimum of the number of places where adjacent discretized phase values differ by more than π. This problem, which is known to be NP-hard, is of considerable practical interest, largely due to its importance in interpreting data acquired with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry. Consequently, many heuristic algorithms for its approximate solution have been proposed. Here we present a novel approach to this problem, based on the local-ratio principle, which guarantees a solution whose cost is at most twice the minimum sought.
Revised: November 2005.
Submitted: October 2004.
Communicated by Martin Fürer


Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications