Piecewise smooth phase reconstruction

A well-founded and computationally fast method is presented for filtering a nd interpolating noisy and discontinuous wrapped phase fields that preserve s both the 2 pi discontinuities that come from the wrapping effect and the true discontinuities that may be present. It also permits the incorporation of an associated quality map, if it is available, in a natural way. Exampl es of its application to the computation of the isoclinic phase from photoe lastic data and to the recovery of discontinuous phase fields from speckle interferometry are presented. (C) 1999 Optical Society of America. OCIS cod es: 100.2000, 100.2650, 100.5070, 120.6160, 100.3020.