A Deep Learning-based Model for Phase Unwrapping

Phase unwrapping is an important problem in several applications that attempts to restore original phase from wrapped phase. In this paper, we propose a novel phase unwrapping model based on the deep convolutional neural network by formulating the phase unwrapping as a semantic segmentation problem. The proposed architecture consists of a convolutional encoder network and corresponding decoder network followed by a pixel-wise classification layer. One of the critical challenges in DCNN is availability of large set of labeled training data. This issue is effectively circumvented for the proposed framework through a generic simulation procedure that automatically generates large labeled data. Results from the proposed method are compared with widely used quality-guided phase unwrapping algorithm for various SNR values. It is found that the proposed method is performing well both in terms of accuracy and computational time, even in the presence strong noise. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses convolutional neural network for phase unwrapping, and this will hopefully pave the way to a new class of techniques for unwrapping the phase.