Statistical mechanics approach to the phase unwrapping problem
  The use of Mean-Field theory to unwrap principal phase patterns has been recently proposed. In this paper we generalize the Mean-Field approach to process phase patterns with arbitrary degree of undersampling. The phase unwrapping problem is formulated as that of finding the ground state of a locally constrained, finite size, spin-L Ising model under a non-uniform magnetic field. The optimization problem is solved by the Mean-Field Annealing technique. Synthetic experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. 
S. Stramaglia, A. Refice, L. Guerriero