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 Measurement Science and Technology

Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 (15pp) https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6501/ab63e8

Comparative study of phase unwrapping

algorithms based on solving the Poisson
equation
Zixin Zhao1 , Hangying Zhang1, Changqing Ma2, Chen Fan1
and Hong Zhao1
1
  State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, School of Mechanical Engineering,
Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, Shaanxi, People’s Republic of China
2
  Department of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Shandong University of Science
and Technology, Tai’an 271019, Shandong, People’s Republic of China

E-mail: zixinzhao@xjtu.edu.cn and zhaohong@xjtu.edu.cn

Received 4 September 2019, revised 14 December 2019

Accepted for publication 19 December 2019
Published 12 March 2020

Abstract
Phase unwrapping is a crucial process to obtain the absolute phase profile in many optical
phase measurement techniques such as interferometry, holography, profilometry, etc. In
this paper, we have studied several phase unwrapping algorithms based on solving the
discrete Poisson equation. The differences among those algorithms lie in two aspects:
one is the calculation of the input for the Poisson equation using the wrapped phase
data and the other is the way to compute the output (unwrapped phase data) using the
corresponding input. Firstly, the method to compute the input for the Poisson equation was
investigated using the finite difference and fast Fourier transform (FFT) methods. Then
different methods, based on FFT or discrete cosine transform, were employed to calculate
the unwrapped phase, and their performances were compared in terms of accuracy
and efficiency. To enhance the precision of those algorithms, an iteration strategy was
introduced and its performance was investigated under different noise conditions. Finally,
several pieces of real phase data was tested by using the direct and iterative methods.
The detailed software package can be found online (www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/
fileexchange/71810-phase-unwrapping-algorithms-by-solving-the-poisson-equation).

Keywords: phase unwrapping, poisson equation, least square, transport of intensity equation

(Some figures may appear in colour only in the online journal)

1. Introduction due to its high accuracy. Nevertheless, the phase is wrapped

Plenty of information that we are interested in is coded in the
phase of light. To obtain the information we want, the phase
needs to be decoded and different methods are proposed [1–10].
Generally, these methods can be clarified into two groups: the
interferometric methods [1, 6] and non-interferometric ones
[2–5, 7–10]. Specifically, the non-interferometric methods can
be divided into three types: the iterative ones [2], the deter-
ministic ones [3, 4, 7, 9, 10] and the combination of the itera-
tive and deterministic methods [5, 8]. Among these methods,
the interferometric methods are the most representative ones
between  −π and π for the most phase demodulation methods.
As a result, phase unwrapping is an important process to get
the final absolute phase profile. To date, many unwrapping
methods have been proposed to solve the problem. They can
be clarified into two groups: time domain and spatial domain.
In the former group, several wrapped phase maps are needed
and the phase unwrapping is accomplished using the same
spatial located pixels obtained at different times. Temporal
phase unwrapping searches the phase jumps through the time
axis [11, 12]. If the phase difference between two consecutive
points is greater than a predetermined threshold, the phase is

1361-6501/20 /065004+15$33.00 1 © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd  Printed in the UK

Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Table 1.  Different combinations for methods to calculate the input and the output of the Poisson equation.

Calculate input Least square Transport of intensity equation

Calculate output Equation (3) Equation (6) Equation (7)
Equation (8) LS-FD-FFT [43] TIE-FD-FFT TIE-FFT-FFT [49–56]
Equation (9) LS-FD-DCT [44–47] TIE-FD-DCT [57] TIE-FFT-DCT

Figure 1.  Unwrapping result and the corresponding residual errors for the six direct methods under different noise levels. (a1)–(a6) denote
the LS-FD-FFT, (b1)–(b6) denote the LS-FD-DCT, (c1)–(c6) denote the TIE-FD-FFT, (d1)–(d6) denote the TIE-FD-DCT, (e1)–(e6) denote
the TIE-FFT-FFT, (f1)–(f6) denote the TIE-FFT-DCT (the image size is 512  ×  512 and the noise std means noise standard deviation).

Figure 2.  The residual RMS errors and the consumed time for the six direct methods under different noise levels. (a) The residual RMS
errors, (b) the consumed time.

added or subtracted by 2π at the latter point. It provides a solu- interval in which the phase of each pixel changes from  −π
tion for absolute phase determination and phase unwrapping to π [17]. While in the latter, only one wrapped phase map is
on a discontinuous phase map [13–16], but it should ensure needed and the phase unwrapping is completed using adjacent
that more than two phase maps are obtained during each pixels in different spatial locations (first or second derivative).

2
Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Figure 3.  The input for (a) the LS-FD based methods, (b) the TIE-FD based methods, (c) the TIE-FFT methods, and (d) the difference
between (a) and (b), (e) the difference between (a) and (c).

Figure 4.  Flowchart of the iteration process using different direct Poisson solvers.

As a result, the spatial domain methods are more widely used
in the actual applications and they can be divided into two
categories: path dependent and path independent. The path-
dependent methods are based on a path integration strategy
to obtain the unwrapped phase map where a lot of strategies
have been proposed, such as the mask cut algorithms [18–25],
the quality-guided path following algorithms [26–37], and the
Flynn’s algorithms [38–40]. The path-independent methods
seek to find an unwrapped phase whose spatial differences
match the differences in the wrapped phase data as closely
as possible, in which the phase unwrapping is completed by
minimization of a global function. Plenty of methods have
been proposed to accomplish this task, such as the least square
(LS)-based algorithms [41–48], the transport of intensity
3
equation (TIE)-based algorithms [49–57], and the polynomial
fitting-based algorithms [58–63].
Here, we briefly introduce the development of the LS- and
TIE-based methods. In early times, scholars have sought to
find the absolute phase using the phase differences [41, 42],
which inspires other researchers to solve the phase unwrap-
ping problem using the wrapped phase differences. By
constructing a discrete Poisson equation, researchers have
adopted the FFT [43] or DCT [44, 45] to solve the equation,
which were termed the direct methods. The direct methods
consume very little time, but the performance is not satisfac-
tory especially for the heavy noise cases. As a result, some
iterative strategies [46–48] have been proposed to improve
the performance of the direct ones at the cost of consuming
Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Figure 5.  Unwrapping result and the corresponding residual errors for the six iterative methods under different noise levels. (a1)–(a6)
denote the LS-FD-FFT, (b1)–(b6) denote the LS-FD-DCT, (c1)–(c6) denote the TIE-FD-FFT, (d1)–(d6) denote the TIE-FD-DCT, (e1)–(e6)
denote the TIE-FFT-FFT, and (f1)–(f6) denote the TIE-FFT-DCT.

more time. The development of the TIE-based methods is 2.  Direct methods
fascinating since it was not named the TIE in early times in
[49–51] until [52] presented a detailed mathematical deriva- Generally, phase unwrapping can be described as the fol-
tion of the TIE-based phase unwrapping algorithm. We found lowing equation:
that those methods [49–51, 53] are mathematically the same φ(x, y) = ϕ(x, y) + 2k(x, y)π,
(1)
with the TIE-based methods (see detailed analysis in sec-
tion  2). That is why we clarify the methods in [49–51, 53] where φ(x, y) is the unwrapped phase, ϕ(x, y) is the wrapped
into the TIE-based methods. Like the LS-based methods, the phase, and k(x, y) is the integer to be solved. Based on the
TIE-based methods can also be clarified into two groups: the assumption that the unwrapped phase and the wrapped
direct [49–56] and iterative ones [57]. Generally, the iterative phase have the same second derivative in the x and y  direc-
method performs better than the direct ones at the expense of tions, the Poisson equation as shown in equation (2) has been
consuming more time. It is worth noting that [56] proposed a constructed:
TIE-based unwrapping method using two wavelengths, which ∂ 2 φ(x, y) ∂ 2 φ(x, y)
can be viewed as a combination of the spatial and temporal (2) + = ρ(x, y),
∂x2 ∂y2
domain methods. Note that the LS- and TIE-based methods
have in common that they all complete the phase unwrapping where ρ(x, y) is the input for the Poisson equation. Currently,
by establishing a discrete Poisson equation [64]. The differ- two ways are adopted to estimate the input for the Poisson
ence between them lies in that the method of calculating the equation using the wrapped phase data. One is the finite dif-
input for the discrete Poisson equation is different, which is ference (FD) method as shown by equation (3):
discussed comprehensively in our paper. ρ(x, y) = ∇2 ϕ(x, y)
The paper is organized as follows. The second section intro- = W(ϕ(x + 1, y) − ϕ(x, y))
duces six direct methods by combining different methods to −W(ϕ(x, y) − ϕ(x − 1, y))
(3)
calculate the input and the output of the Poisson equation. +W(ϕ(x, y + 1) − ϕ(x, y))
The third section explains an iterative strategy to enhance the
−W(ϕ(x, y) − ϕ(x, y − 1)),
noise performance of six direct methods and the performance
of those iterative methods is investigated under different noise where ∇2 is the Laplacian operator and W is the wrapping
levels. The fourth section  presents some real unwrapping operator satisfying that W(x) = arctan(sin(x)/cos(x)). It
results using the direct and iterative methods respectively. is widely used in the traditional least square (LS) method
Finally, the fifth section concludes the paper. [43–47]. The other is based on the analytical solution of the

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Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Figure 6.  The iteration process of (a) LS-FD-DCT and (b) TIE-FD-DCT with a noise standard deviation equal to 1.

transport of intensity equation  (TIE) and the input for the

Poisson equation can be calculated by equation (4) [52]:
ρ(x, y) = Im(e−iϕ(x,y) ∇2 (eiϕ(x,y) )),
(4)
where Im indicates the imaginary part. Note that if we
expanded equation (4) according to the Euler’s formula, equa-
tion (4) is derived as the following equation [53]:
ρ(x, y) = cos(ϕ(x, y)) · ∇2 (sin(ϕ(x, y)))

− sin(ϕ(x, y)) · ∇2 (cos(ϕ(x, y))). (5)
Since equations (4) and (5) are equivalent, we have classified
these Fourier-based methods [49–51, 53] as the TIE-based
methods. However, using equation  (5) as the input to solve
the Poisson equation, more Fourier transforms (six in [51]
and eight in [50]) are needed. As a result, equation (4) is used
in our paper. To solve equation (4), we can use two different
strategies. One is the same as we adopted in equation (3). We
only need to replace ϕ(x, y) by eiϕ(x,y) and ρ(x, y) can be esti- Figure 7.  The iteration process of TIE-FFT-DCT with a noise
standard deviation equal to 1.
mated by equation (6):
ρ(x, y) = Im{e−iϕ(x,y) [W(eiϕ(x+1,y) − eiϕ(x,y) ) − W(eiϕ(x,y) − eiϕ(x−1,y) ) where DCT and DCT−1 are the discrete cosine transform and
+W(eiϕ(x,y+1) − eiϕ(x,y) ) − W(eiϕ(x,y) − eiϕ(x,y−1) )]}. (6) inverse discrete cosine transform, respectively. M, N are the

dimensional size in x and y  directions. Note that the input
The other strategy is to use the fast Fourier transform (FFT) ρ(x, y) can be computed according to equations  (3), (6) or
to estimate ρ(x, y): (7). Since equation (3) is based on the traditional least square
ρ(x, y) = Im{e−iϕ(x,y) FFT−1 [( fx2 + fy2 )FFT(eiϕ(x,y) )]},
(7) method and equations  (6) and (7) are based on the trans-
port of intensity equation. We can see that the method using
where FFT and FFT−1 represent the Fourier transform and its equations  (3) and (8) is based on the least square using the
inverse transform respectively. finite difference and fast Fourier transform (LS-FD-FFT), the
After the input for the discrete Poisson equation  was method using equations (6) and (8) is based on the transport of
determined, the way to solve the equation is quite important. intensity equation using the finite difference and fast Fourier
Typically, the direct method based on a fast Fourier transform transform (TIE-FD-FFT), and the method using equations (7)
(FFT) or discrete cosine transform (DCT) is widely used, and and (8) is based on the transport of intensity equation using
the unwrapped phase can be obtained as follows: the fast Fourier transforms (TIE-FFT-FFT). By using equa-
ñ ô tion  (9) to compute the unwrapped phase (output), another
−1 FFT(ρ(x, y))
(8) φ(x, y) = FFT , three methods are shown in table  1 with their abbreviated
fx2 + fy2
form. Note that the LS-FD-FFT, LS-FD-DCT, TIE-FFT-FFT
ñ ô were developed by other researchers, especially the latter
DCT (ρ(x, y))
−1 two methods that have been widely used (see the detailed
φ(x, y) = DCT
(9)       ,
2 cos π Mx + cos π Ny − 2 references in table  1). The TIE-FD-DCT was developed by

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Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Figure 8.  Unwrapping result and the corresponding residual errors for the six iterative methods under complex noise levels (additive and
multiplicative/speckle noise). (a1)–(a6) denote the LS-FD-FFT, (b1)–(b6) denote the LS-FD-DCT, (c1)–(c6) denote the TIE-FD-FFT,
(d1)–(d6) denote the TIE-FD-DCT, (e1)–(e6) denote the TIE-FFT-FFT, and (f1)–(f6) denote the TIE-FFT-DCT.

Figure 9.  The iteration process of the TIE-FD-DCT method under complex noise conditions (speckle size equals 1 pixel and the additive
noise deviation is 1). (a) Unwrapped phase maps and (b) residual error maps (wrapped) with the corresponding iteration number N.

us in [57] and the remaining two methods are developed by
us for the first time in the manuscript. What is more, all the
FFT-based Poisson solvers have applied the Volkov’s mirror-
padding scheme [65] to the wrapped phase. The employment
of this kind of padding strategy will generate a good approx­
imation to the Neumann boundary conditions [66–68] and it
also fulfils the cyclic conditions of the FFT-based solvers [52].
To investigate the performance of the above six methods
under different noise levels (Gaussian white noise), we con-
ducted a simulation using a phase map generated by the
MATLAB built-in function peaks. The original phase equals
8·peaks (512). We first rewrapped the phase map and then
different methods were used to unwrap the wrapped phase
map. The unwrapped result is shown in figure  1. It can be
seen from figure  1 that the LS-FD-DCT performs the best
for the noise-free condition. The LS-FD-FFT, TIE-FFT-FFT,
and TIE-FFT-DCT also have good performance in this condi-
tion, while the TIE-FD-FFT and TIE-FD-DCT have almost
the same and worst performance over the six methods. As
the noise increases, the traditional LS-based methods per-
form better than the TIE-based methods, which shows that
the LS-based methods have some anti-noise performance.
Nevertheless, this anti-noise performance is quite limited,
since all the six methods fail when the noise standard devia-
tion equals 1.
Specifically, we have computed the root mean square
(RMS) of the residual error (the difference between the
unwrapped phase and the ideal one) for the six methods
with respect to different noise levels and the result is shown
in figure  2(a). It can be seen that the traditional LS-based
methods perform best, followed by the TIE-FFT methods, and
the TIE-FD-based methods perform the worst. Figure  2(b)
shows the consumed time for six methods under different
noise levels. As can be seen, the FD-DCT-based methods use
less time than the FD-FFT-based methods, which is consistent
with the result in [69].

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Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

It can be seen from figure  2(a) that the TIE-FD-based

methods produce significant error when there is no noise at
the wrapped phase map. To find the reason for that, the input
ρ(x, y) for the LS-FD, TIE-FD, and TIE-FFT methods were
calculated and are shown in figures 3(a)–(c) respectively.
Since the LS-FD-based methods have the best accuracy
for the noise free condition, we use the input for the LS-FD
methods as the benchmark, and the difference between
­figures 3(a) and (b) is shown in figure 3(d). Figure 3(e) shows
the difference between figures 3(a) and (c). It can be seen that
calculating the input for the Poisson equation  using equa-
tion (6) has significant errors, which is the main error source of
the TIE-FD-based methods in the noise free condition. We can
also find that calculating the input using equation (7) also has
some errors, but they mainly exist in the border of the map. As
a result, the TIE-FFT-based methods work better than the TIE-
FD-based methods but worse than the LS-FD-based methods.

3.  Iterative methods

It can be seen from the above simulation that the performance
of the direct methods is not so satisfactory, especially for the
noisy phase data. To improve the performance of the direct
method, we have introduced an iteration strategy based on
an unwrapped phase correction process (integer correction).
In our previously proposed iterative method [57], the TIE-
FD-DCT was used to calculate the initial unwrapped phase
and the stopping condition is that the integer k(x, y) is no
longer changed for all the pixels. Note that the other five direct
methods can also be incorporated into this iteration strategy.
The detailed iteration process is shown in figure 4. By using
different Poisson solvers (different direct methods), the corre­
sponding iterative algorithms can be constructed. Specifically,
the iterative procedure uses the differences between the first
unwrapped phase obtained by equation  (8) or (9) and the
second unwrapped phase obtained by equation (1). Thus, the
errors in integer k(x, y) can be corrected as much as possible
with the iteration process. What is more, we have updated the
iterative termination criteria since the old condition in [57] is
a quite critical one that makes the iteration process very time-
consuming. The new stop criteria are that the integer k(x, y)
is no longer changed for all the pixels or the RMS difference
between the adjacent residual errors is less than a specified
threshold, e.g. 10−5.
3.1.  Unwrapping performance of the iterative methods under
different Gaussian noise
We firstly investigated the performance of the six iterative
methods under different Gaussian noise levels. The stopping
threshold was set to 10−5 for all the methods. The result is
shown in figure  5. It can be seen that the performance of
the six methods is almost the same and perfect in the noise-
free condition. As the noise increases, the TIE-FD-FFT, TIE-
FD-DCT, and TIE-FFT-FFT perform better than the LS-based
methods. Note that the LS-FD-FFT and LS-FD-DCT per-
form almost the same in the three noise conditions. We can
Figure 10.  The wrapped phase map obtained with a Twyman–
Green interferometer (a) by measuring an optical planar surface (b)
and spherical surface (c).
also find that the TIE-FFT-DCT performs the worst in the
noisy conditions. To find the reason for that, we analyzed
the detailed iteration process of the TIE-FD-DCT method
(best performance), the LS-FD-DCT method (poor perfor-
mance) and the TIE-FFT-DCT (worst performance) with a
noise standard deviation equal to 1. Figure  6(a) shows the
iteration process of the LS-FD-DCT. Note that the RMS
value that represents the difference between the adjacent
unwrapped phase maps was used to determine whether the
iteration needs to be terminated or not. It can be seen that
the iteration was terminated after five iterations, while the
unwrapped phase map remains almost unchanged during the
iteration process, which indicates that the proposed iteration
strategy cannot significantly improve the performance of the
LS-based method under a heavy noise condition. However,
the performance of the TIE-FD-DCT is greatly enhanced by
employing the same iteration strategy. As can be seen from
figure 6(b), the unwrapped phase becomes better and better
until the iteration is stopped.
Figure 7 shows the iteration process of the TIE-FFT-DCT
method. We found an interesting phenomenon that the
unwrapped phase map became better in the first several steps
and then rapidly got worse and worse. Note that the unwrapped
phase maps are obtained with the same termination threshold
of 10−5. To obtain satisfactory unwrapping results by using
the iterative method based on TIE-FFT-DCT, it is recom-
mended to use a threshold of 10−1.
3.2.  Unwrapping performance of the iterative methods under
different combined noise
When measuring the rough surface/object with interferom-
etry, the speckle or coherent noise widely exists, such as
in ESPI [70–72], OCT [53, 73–75], etc. The speckle is the

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Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Figure 11.  Unwrapping result of the direct and iterative methods for the wrapped phase data in figure 10. (a1)–(a4) denote the LS-FD-FFT,
(b1)–(b4) denote the LS-FD-DCT, (c1)–(c4) denote the TIE-FD-FFT, (d1)–(d4) denote the TIE-FD-DCT, (e1)–(e4) denote the TIE-FFT-
FFT, and (f1)–(f4) denote the TIE-FFT-DCT.

Figure 12.  The obtained wrapped phase map. (a) Low speckle noise and (b) high speckle noise.

result of the interference among multiple beams with random
phase differences [76], which heavily degrades the fringe
or image contrast. To test the performance of the six itera-
tive methods under such a complex noise condition. We first
generated a wrapped phase map containing a speckle noise
with an average size of 1 pixel according to the [77]. Then
different additive Gaussian noise was added to the wrapped
phase map as shown in the first column of figure 8. Six itera-
tive methods were adopted to unwrap the noisy phase maps
respectively. Note that the iteration termination threshold was
set to 10−5 for all the methods except for the TIE-FFT-DCT-
based method. As we stated before, the TIE-FFT-DCT will
perform very badly for such a threshold and, as a result, it was
set to 10−1 for the TIE-FFT-DCT method. The unwrapping
result is shown in figure 8. It can be seen that the TIE-based
methods perform better than the LS-based methods under
this complex noise condition. Specifically, when the additive
noise standard deviation equals zero (only the speckle noise
exists), the TIE-FD-FFT, TIE-FD-DCT, and TIE-FFT-FFT
methods can successfully unwrap the wrapped phase map.
The TIE-FFT-DCT method has worse performance than other
TIE-based methods since it has significant errors in the area
with a relatively high fringe density as shown in figure 8(f2).
Note that the LS-based methods have the same and worst per-
formance. When the additive noise deviation increases to 0.5,
as can be seen in figures 8(a4)–(f4), only the TIE-FD-based
methods can unwrap successfully, the performance of other
four methods become worse. It should be noted that all the six
methods fail to unwrap in the condition that the additive noise
deviation is 1. The reason why iterations will not work well
with high noise level may be that the heavy noise affects the
calculation of the input of the Poisson equation. Note that the
phase obtained by the TIE-FD-based method is closer to the
true phase. Specifically, as the iteration number increases, the

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Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Figure 13.  Unwrapping result of the direct and iterative methods for the wrapped phase data in figure 12. (a1)–(a4) denote the LS-FD-FFT,
(b1)–(b4) denote the LS-FD-DCT, (c1)–(c4) denote the TIE-FD-FFT, (d1)–(d4) denote the TIE-FD-DCT, (e1)–(e4) denote the TIE-FFT-
FFT, and (f1)–(f4) denote the TIE-FFT-DCT.

unwrapped phase maps and residual error maps obtained by

the iterative TIE-FD-DCT method are shown in figures 9(a)
and (b) respectively.
It can be seen that, as the iteration number increases to
6 and 7, the residual error maps change a little, causing the
unwrapped phase map almost unchanged. This indicates that
the improvement of the iteration process is very limited when
the heavy noise exists. To successfully unwrap the wrapped
phase with such a heavy noise level, a pre-denoising opera-
tion might be needed. Overall, the TIE-FD-based methods
have the best performance under such a complex noise
condition.

4.  Case studies Figure 14.  The simulated SAR phase data.

4.1.  Application to the interferometry for measuring optical

surfaces
To evaluate the performance of the direct and iterative methods
on the real data, several experiments were conducted. The first
experiment was to measure an optical planar and spherical
surface using the Twyman–Green interferometer as shown
in figure  10(a). Using the generalized principal component
analysis method [78] to demodulate the phase shifted fringe
patterns, the wrapped phase map with a size of 512  ×  512,
as shown in figures 10(b) and (c), can be obtained. It can be
seen that the image contains very little noise. We then applied
the direct and iterative methods to the data respectively, and
the unwrapped phase maps were acquired and are shown in
figure 11.
As can be seen from figure  11 that all the methods can
successfully finish the unwrapping task, which is consistent
with the simulation results shown in figures  1(a1)–(f1) and
5(a1)–(f1). Since the wrapped phase contains little noise, the
direct LS-FD-DCT may be a better choice as it consumes the
least amount of time. As a matter of fact, this method is widely
used in quite low noise conditions.
4.2.  Application to the electronic speckle interferometry
(ESPI)
Other experiments were conducted to measure the deforma-
tion of a roughly planar surface using the phase shifting elec-
tronic speckle interferometry. The obtained wrapped phase
maps with a size of 512  ×  512 are shown in figure 12. It can
be seen that the wrapped phase maps are corrupted by speckle
noise and the noise in figure  12(b) is stronger than that in
figure 12(a).

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Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Figure 15.  Unwrapping result of the direct and iterative methods for the wrapped phase data in figure 14. (a1) and (a2) denote the LS-FD-
FFT, (b1) and (b2) denote the LS-FD-DCT, (c1) and (c2) denote the TIE-FD-FFT, (d1) and (d2) denote the TIE-FD-DCT, (e1) and (e2)
denote the TIE-FFT-FFT, and (f1) and (f2) denote the TIE-FFT-DCT.

Using the direct and iterative methods to unwrap the

phase maps, the corresponding results are shown in figure 13.
Specifically, figures  13(a1)–(f1) and (a3)–(f3) show the
unwrapped phase maps obtained by the six direct methods
and figures  13(a2)–(f2) and (a4)–(f4) depict the unwrapped
phase maps by using the iterative methods. It can be seen
that the direct methods have a satisfactory performance when
the noise is low, but they fail when the noise is quite heavy.
Besides, the iteration strategy can improve the performance of
the corresponding direct methods. Nevertheless, the iterative
methods perform almost the same in a low noise condition
while they perform differently under a high noise condition.
Concretely, the TIE-FD-based iterative methods perform the
best, which is consistent with the result in simulation. Figure 16.  1D transfer function of the Poisson equation.

10
Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Figure 17.  Cosine map of the corresponding unwrapped phase maps shown in figure 15.

Table 2.  The RMS errors for the direct and iterative methods (Rad).

Methods LS-FD-FFT LS-FD-DCT TIE-FD-FFT TIE-FD-DCT TIE-FFT-FFT TIE-FFT-DCT

Data Direct Iterative Direct Iterative Direct Iterative Direct Iterative Direct Iterative Direct Iterative
−3
Figure 10(b) 10 0 10−10 0 1.191 0 1.190 0 0.034 0 0.037 0
Figure 10(c) 0.050 0.012 0.044 0.012 0.427 0 0.426 0 0.394 0 0.397 0.012
Figure 12(a) 0.532 0.174 0.511 0.173 1.286 0.066 1.273 0 1.432 0.010 1.435 0.069
Figure 12(b) 4.768 4.663 4.764 4.659 5.582 0.368 5.573 0 6.745 1.702 6.742 3.904
Figure 14 2.636 2.746 2.628 2.871 9.808 2.666 9.807 0 4.538 2.602 4.538 2.197
Figure 14 1.745 1.048 1.742 0 8.525 3.926 8.523 2.871 3.548 3.831 3.547 2.064

4.3.  Application to the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) where F represents the Fourier transform. If we consider the
interferometry 1D case, the transfer function H( f ) = 1/f 2  , which is similar
to a low pass filter as shown in figure 16. As a result, all the
The data we used is a simulated interferometric SAR (InSAR)
direct methods have the smooth effect.
example supplied in [79] (see details in chapter 3 of the book).
To clearly see this smooth effect, we have presented the
It was generated based on a real digital elevation model of
cosine map of the corresponding unwrapped phase data in
mountainous terrain around Longs Peak, Colorado, using a
figure 17. As depicted by the red arrows in figure 17 the fringe
high-fidelity InSAR simulator that models the SAR point
density in the result obtained by direct methods becomes
spread function, the InSAR geometry, the speckle noise, and
sparse in the area with sudden phase changes. Note that the
the layover and shadow phenomena [80]. The wrapped phase
smooth effect is more significant for TIE-FD-based methods.
with a size of 152  ×  458 is shown in figure 14. It can be seen
Fortunately, the smooth effect can be suppressed by employing
that the wrapped phase contains some high slope features,
our proposed iteration strategy.
which results in high-density phase fringes.
To quantitatively evaluate the performance of those methods,
The unwrapping result obtained using the direct and itera-
we choose the result obtained by the iterative TIE-FD-DCT
tive methods are shown in figures 15(a1)–(f1) and (a2)–(f2)
method as the benchmark. As a result, the RMS error and con-
respectively.
sumed time for those methods are presented in tables 2 and 3
It can be seen that the high slope features in the phase data
respectively. As can be seen in table 2, the iterative methods
obtained by direct methods are lost. As a result, the direct
can get a result with better accuracy. Note that the RMS values
Poisson solvers can be regarded as a low pass filter. As a
in the last two rows are obtained by using a different bench-
matter of fact, if we make the Fourier transform of the Poisson
mark (the zero value indicates the corresponding benchmark).
equation as shown in equation (2), we can get
The error of some iterative methods is slightly larger than the
direct ones, which is shown in red. The reason may be that the
1 two benchmarks are not ideal enough, which indicates that our
F(φ(x, y)) = 2
(10) F(ρ(x, y)),
fx + fy2 iteration strategy for the data with high slopes needs further

11
Meas. Sci. Technol. 31 (2020) 065004 Z Zhao et al

Table 3.  The consumed time for the direct and iterative methods (seconds).

Methods LS-FD-FFT LS-FD-DCT TIE-FD-FFT TIE-FD-DCT TIE-FFT-FFT TIE-FFT-DCT

Data Direct Iterative Direct Iterative Direct Iterative Direct Iterative Direct Iterative Direct Iterative
Figure 10(b) 0.122 0.226 0.056 0.119 0.152 0.470 0.067 0.213 0.133 0.285 0.140 0.303
Figure 10(c) 0.111 0.233 0.057 0.121 0.149 0.615 0.068 0.210 0.133 0.582 0.144 0.485
Figure 12(a) 0.122 1.480 0.058 0.237 0.155 1.387 0.070 0.490 0.137 1.070 0.144 0.585
Figure 12(b) 0.121 2.130 0.058 0.302 0.149 10.857 0.067 3.163 0.140 10.721 0.144 0.440
Figure 14 0.045 0.283 0.025 0.071 0.049 4.583 0.018 0.235 0.059 5.807 0.045 0.125

improvement. The consumed time for the unwrapping process
was calculated using the code implemented with MATLAB on
a computer with an Intel Core i5 processor with a clock rate
of 1.8 GHz, and a memory size of 8 GB. It can be seen from
table 3 that the time needed for the direct methods depends on
the image size and the type of transform, since DCT is faster
than FFT, while the factors affecting the time consumed by
the iterative methods lie in two aspects: the time needed in
one loop (direct method) and the number of loops. Note that
the number of loops depends on the noise level of the data and
the pre-determined threshold. That is why the iterative TIE-
FFT-DCT method with a threshold of 10−1 consumed much
less time than other iterative TIE-based methods (threshold is
10−5) for the data in figure 12(b).
5. Conclusions
In this paper, we have studied the phase unwrapping problem,
which is modeled as a discrete Poisson equation. Different
methods to compute the input and output of the equation have
been presented. As a result, six direct methods (Poisson
solvers) are developed. Simulation and experimental results
show that all six direct methods can unwrap successfully in
very low noise conditions. Specifically, the LS-FD-DCT
method performs the best in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Besides, the traditional LS-FD-based methods show some
anti-noise properties though it is very limited. What is more,
the direct methods have a smooth effect on the phase data with
high slope features, which also restricts its use for the real
applications, especially for the InSAR data. Since the direct
methods are very sensitive to noise and high slope features,
we have developed an iteration strategy to improve the per-
formance of the direct methods on the phase data under high
noise levels as well as on the phase data with high slopes.
Simulation and experimental results show that the itera-
tion strategy significantly improves the performance of the
six direct methods. However, the improvement of the itera-
tion on the six direct methods is different especially for the
high noise cases. The TIE-FD-based iteration methods have
the best performance as they can get a better result than the
other four methods for the phase data with relatively high
noise. Note that our proposed iteration strategy may also
be applied to other unwrapping algorithms to improve their
performance. Overall, the iterative methods, especially the
TIE-FD-DCT-based method, are recommended to be used
in the actual applications. However, the performance of the
iterative methods was not so satisfactory under a very heavy
noise condition (as shown in figures 8(c6)–(d6)), a weighting
[81–83] or pre-filtering [37, 84–89] strategy can be adopted to
further improve the performance of those methods. Besides,
with a booming development of deep learning [90–97], using
a proper network to enhance or accomplish the phase unwrap-
ping is also a promising research direction.
Acknowledgments
This work is financially supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51705404), National
Key Research and Development Programs of China (Grant No.
2018YFC1603500), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation
(Grant No. 2016M602806), the Fundamental Research Funds
for the Central Universities (Grant No. xjj2017093), the China
Scholarship Council Foundation (Grant No. 201806285004),
and the Funding for the Growth Plan of Young Teachers in
Shandong.
ORCID iDs
Zixin Zhao https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6597-8873
Hong Zhao https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0927-8634
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