Statistical mechanics approach to the phase unwrapping problem

The use of mean-field theory to unwrap principal phase patterns has been recently proposed. In this paper we generalize the mean-field approach to process phase patterns with arbitrary degree of undersampling. The phase unwrapping problem is formulated as that of finding the ground state of a locally constrained, finite size, spin-L Ising model under a non-uniform magnetic field. The optimization problem is solved by the mean-field annealing technique. Synthetic experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.