Piecewise smooth phase reconstruction.

A well-founded and computationally fast method is presented for filtering and interpolating noisy and discontinuous wrapped phase fields that preserves both the 2pi discontinuities that come from the wrapping effect and the true discontinuities that may be present. It also permits the incorporation of an associated quality map, if it is available, in a natural way. Examples of its application to the computation of the isoclinic phase from photoelastic data and to the recovery of discontinuous phase fields from speckle interferometry are presented.