Fast reconstruction and prediction of frozen flow turbulence based on structured Kalman filtering

Efficient and optimal prediction of frozen flow turbulence using the complete observation history of the wavefront sensor is an important issue in adaptive optics for large ground-based telescopes. At least for the sake of error budgeting and algorithm performance, the evaluation of an accurate estimate of the optimal performance of a particular adaptive optics configuration is important. However, due to the large number of grid points, high sampling rates, and the non-rationality of the turbulence power spectral density, the computational complexity of the optimal predictor is huge. This paper shows how a structure in the frozen flow propagation can be exploited to obtain a state-space innovation model with a particular sparsity structure. This sparsity structure enables one to efficiently compute a structured Kalman filter. By simulation it is shown that the performance can be improved and the computational complexity can be reduced in comparison with auto-regressive predictors of low order. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America