NEW PROCEDURE FOR WAVE-FRONT RECONSTRUCTION

A new method for quantitatively determining the shape of a wavefront f rom an interferogram recorded with a shearing interferometer will be p resented. The method is based on filtering of the wavefront difference in the frequency domain with a transfer function specifically determi ned for this purpose. A never window function is used to deal with the influence of the edge of the pupil. This method does not require any a priori information about the shape of the wavefront to be calculated . Furthermore, it leads to accurate results with high lateral resoluti on for relatively large shears (up to 0.2 of the aperture), reconstruc ts the information inside the whole aperture, and requires much less c omputational effort than procedures hitherto known. A realistic exampl e with typical imaging errors of optical systems is used to illustrate the procedure and the intermediate states.