A fast minimum discontinuity based phase unwrapping method

Phase unwrapping (PU) is important in reconstructing the digital elevation model (DEM) of a scene from its interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data. The traditional minimum discontinuity PU algorithms are highly accurate while with time-consuming computation. To solve this problem, we combined a novel idea, fast pre-unwrapping where dipole cuts are generated and optimized, with Flynn's algorithm. The preliminary result obtained by the fast pre-unwrapping algorithm can be further optimized with Flynn's algorithm efficiently. The effectiveness and the efficiency are tested on the simulated and real InSAR data.