Role of boundary measurements in curvature sensing

The role of boundary measurements in curvature sensing is analyzed in basis of the method of weighting functions. It is shown that depending on the or thogonal basis chosen to expand the wavefront some modes can be exactly res tored from the curvature data only, without the boundary information. This fact implies that curvature sensing technique can be used without contour m easurements to evaluate some given modes. Therefore, if the contribution to the total phase distortion of the non-estimated modes is relatively small compared to the estimated ones, the method can be successfully applied avoi ding edge measurements. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rig hts reserved.