Wei He1, Ling Xia1, Yiyuan Cheng1, Feng Liu2, Stuart Crozier2
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China; 2The School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
A discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (dPSO) is proposed for solving the branch-cut phase unwrapping problem. All the residues are first grouped by dividing the phase image into sub-regions. Then, the dPSO is performed region-by-region to match the opposite polarity residues that are connected by branch cuts afterward. The nearest-neighbor algorithm is employed to place branch cuts among any residues left. Finally, a flood-fill method is implemented to unwrap the phases over the whole image avoiding the branch cuts. The performance of the proposed algorithm was tested on sample MRI wrapped-phase images. The experiment shows that it can achieve better results compared to a previously published algorithm.