DETERMINATION OF THE WAVE-FRONT ABERRATION FUNCTION FROM MEASURED VALUES OF THE POINT-SPREAD FUNCTION - A 2-DIMENSIONAL PHASE RETRIEVAL PROBLEM

We outline a method for the determination of the unknown wave-front aberration function of an optical system from noisy measurements of the corresponding point-spread function. The problem is cast as a nonlinear unconstrained minimization problem, and trust region techniques are employed for its solution in conjunction with analytic evaluations of the Jacobian and Hessian matrices governing slope and curvature information. Some illustrative numerical results are presented and discussed.