Flynn′s minimum discontinuity algorithm can be used to successfully solve many different kinds of phase unwrapping problems, but its main drawback is that it requires a large amount of computations and has low efficiency in searching for the phase′s discontinuity areas because it takes the whole phase image as the cycling search area. To overcome this drawback, a new minimum discontinuity algorithm based on tabu search is proposed. In the new algorithm, the quality map of wrapped phase is used to classify the total nodes into several ranks from low to high according to the value of quality. The nodes within high quality areas are temporarily taboo, and those within low-qualified areas are searched for phase discontinuity in priority. This tabu search strategy ensures the search process storts from the areas whose probability of discontinuity are highest, and thus can avoid the useless search as much as possible, speed up the convergence rate of the algorithm, and improve the operational efficiency of the phase unwrapping algorithm significantly.