Novel phase unwrapping technique based on extended information filter

•A general framework of a phase unwrapping procedure based on extended information filter is built. It is worth mentioning that the extended information filter that is a new type of filter with high efficiency and high robustness, is applied to acquire the unambiguous unwrapped phase of wrapped phase images for the first time toour knowledge.•Two phase unwrapping algorithms with different observed models, are proposed to accurately and efficently unwrap noisy wrapped phase images by combining an extended information filter with an efficient phase gradient estimator, and an efficient quality-guided strategy based on heap-sort. A general framework of a phase unwrapping procedure based on extended information filter is built. Two phase unwrapping algorithms with different observed models, are proposed by combining an extended information filter with an efficient phase gradient estimator, and an efficient quality-guided strategy based on heap-sort. The extended information filter that is a new type of filter with high efficiency and high robustness, is applied to acquire the unambiguous unwrapped phase of wrapped phase images for the first time to our knowledge. Through the application of the extended information filter, simultaneous phase unwrapping and noise suppression have been performed. The efficient phase gradient estimator that has been demonstrated well, is used to efficiently acquire phase gradient information required for the proposed algorithms. The efficient quality-guided strategy based on heap-sort is used to define the path of the proposed algorithms and to guarantee that they efficiently unwrap wrapped pixels along the path, from high-reliance to low-reliance regions. Synthetic and experimental data is used to demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can obtain robust solutions with reasonable time consumption, compared with some of the more traditional algorithms.