WAVE-FRONT RECOVERY FROM 2 ORTHOGONAL SHEARED INTERFEROGRAMS

We present a new technique for using the information of two orthogonal lateral-shear interferograms to estimate an aspheric wave front. The wave-front estimation from sheared inteferometric data may be consider ed an ill-posed problem in the sense of Hadamard. We apply Thikonov re gularization theory to estimate the wave front that has produced the l ateral sheared interferograms as the minimizer of a positive definite- quadratic cost functional. The introduction of the regularization term permits one to find a well-defined and stable solution to the inverse shearing problem over the wave-front aperture as well as to reduce wa ve-front noise as desired. (C) 1996 Optical Society of America