A Comparative Study of two Prominent Phase Unwrapping Algorithms used In Digital Holography

Abstract

Phase wrapping is one of the most important concerns in digital holography. Although many algorithms (David R Burton et al, 1994) were developed to implement phase unwrapping, most of them had several drawbacks such as data corruption due to ambiguities and time consumption. In this paper, we compare two different approaches for phase unwrapping. The first is weighted and unweighted phase unwrapping proposed by Ghiglia. The second is branch cut method proposed by Goldstein. The former gave efficient results even in the case of high levels of noise and solved the problem of regional inconsistencies whereas the latter limited the propagation of local errors as global errors.