Statistical mechanics approach to the phase unwrapping problem

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