Direct Phase Estimation from Phase Differences Using Fast Elliptic PDE Solvers

Obtaining robust phase estimates from phase differences is a problem common to severed areas of importance to the optics and signal processing community. Specific areas of application include speckle imaging and interferometry, adaptive optics, compensated imaging, and coherent imaging such as synthetic-aperture radar. The purpose of this paper is to relate the equations describing the phase estimation problem to the general form of elliptic partial differential equations, and illustrate results of reconstructions on large M by N grids using existing, published, and readily available Fortran subroutines.