New procedure for wavefront reconstruction

A new method for quantitatively determining the shape of a wavefront from an interferogram recorded with a shearing interferometer will be presented. The method is based on filtering of the wavefront difference in the frequency domain with a transfer function specifically determined 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 resolution for relatively large shears (up to 0.2 of the aperture), reconstructs the information inside the whole aperture, and requires much less computational effort than procedures hitherto known. A realistic example with typical imaging errors of optical systems is used to illustrate the procedure and the intermediate states.