Simple and effective phase unwrapping technique

Abstract

This paper describes a simple and effective phase unwrapping technique that prevents the propagation of errors introduced at some locations on a surface from being included in or propagating to all subsequent calculations for the remaining area of the surface. Unlike conventional phase unwrapping methods that use only the principal phase value, the proposed technique utilizes the modulation information about the fringe pattern to divide the principal phase map into regions, performs mathematical morphology operations to generate a labeled unwrapping sequence mask, and carries out multi-stage phase unwrapping procedures.