PURE: Scalable Phase Unwrapping with Spatial Redundant Arcs

Abstract: Phase unwrapping is a key problem in many coherent imaging systems, such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry. A general formulation for redundant integration of finite differences for phase unwrapping (Costantini et al., 2010) was shown to produce a more reliable solution by exploiting redundant differential estimates. However, this technique requires a commercial linear programming solver for large-scale problems. For a linear cost function, we propose a method based on Dual Decomposition that breaks the given problem defined over a non-planar graph into tractable sub-problems over planar subgraphs. We also propose a decomposition technique that exploits the underlying graph structure for solving the sub-problems efficiently and guarantees asymptotic convergence to the globally optimal solution. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is comparable to the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of the estimate with a better runtime and memory footprint.