Low-Latency Shack-Hartmann Wavefront Sensor Based on an Industrial Smart Camera

Wavefront sensing is important in various optical measurement systems, particularly in the field of adaptive optics (AO). For AO systems, the sampling rate, as well as the latency time, of the wavefront sensors (WFSs) imposes a restriction on the overall achievable temporal resolution. In this paper, we propose a versatile Shack-Hartmann WFS based on an industrial smart camera for high-performance measurements of wavefront deformations, using a low-cost field-programmable gate array as the parallel processing platform. The proposed wavefront reconstruction adds a processing latency of only 740 ns for calculating wavefront characteristics from the pixel stream of the image sensor, providing great potential for demanding AO system designs.