Mean-field annealing for phase unwrapping

Use of mean-field annealing theory is proposed for solving the phase-unwrap ping (PU) problem. PU is formulated as a constrained optimization problem f or the field of integer corrections to be added to the wrapped gradient fie ld. A deterministic algorithm is described to provide an approximation of t he average of the correction field over the global minima of the cost funct ion. The proposed algorithm can be applied for any choice of the cost funct ion. Using a cost function based on second-order differences, we obtain res ults close to those from simulated annealing and spend less computational t ime. (C) 1999 Optical Society of America. OCIS codes: 280.0280, 100.5070, 1 20.3180.