Patent Document ID: 8581781
Application ID: 13029810
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. An interferometer for estimating at least one interferometric parameter of one or more signals from a source, the interferometer comprising: at least one phase detector configured to determine a vector φ of N phase measurements of the one or more source signals; a combined estimator configured to estimate a vector Θ of M sought parameters representing the at least one interferometric parameter, and at least one noise parameter by processing the vector φ of N phase measurements received from the at least one phase detector, where N is greater than M, each element of the vector φ of N phase measurements is related to the vector Θ of M sought parameters by a vector of N inter numbers k of phase cycles missed in the N phase measurements φ, a vector n of N phase errors associated with the N phase measurements φ, and a matrix A with dimensions N×M comprising M column vectors α i that are N-dimensional linearly independent vectors of relatively prime numbers; and a postprocessor configured to process estimates of the vector Θ of M sought parameters based on the at least one noise parameter received from the combined estimator to improve an estimate of the at least one interferometric parameter.