1. A method of unwrapping the phase of an image, comprising the steps of: a) providing a sensor to gather an image having horizontal and vertical pixels; b) choosing one or more starting points with known absolute phase; c) determining the phase gradient between the starting points and their four nearest horizontal and vertical neighbors; d) beginning the creation of a path by choosing the nearest neighbor with correlation above the first threshold of a starting point associated with the minimum gradient, the result being a first link in a path having six nearest neighbors not yet in the path, three of the six neighbors being associated with the starting point, and the other three being new neighbors associated with the nearest neighbor chosen on the basis of minimum gradient; e) storing all of the gradients associated with each neighbor in a memory device; f) sorting the neighbors associated with the path using an efficient software algorithm, including those associated with the three new neighbors, as a function of phase gradient; g) choosing the pixel among all of the neighbors of the path having correlation above a first probablistically defined threshold representing the minimum gradient, thereby forming the next link of a path, which will include up to three new nearest neighbors; h) repeating steps e) to g) when the paths extend to include all of the pixels of the image that can be reached by paths that include only pixels above the first correlation threshold; and i) repeating steps e) through h) for each correlation threshold until all pixels reachable by a path including only pixels above the lowest correlation threshold have been unwrapped.