Direct wavefront sensing with a plenoptic sensor based on deep learning

Abstract

Traditional plenoptic wavefront sensors (PWS) suffer from the obvious step change of the slope response which leads to the poor performance of phase retrieval. In this paper, a neural network model combining the transformer architecture with the U-Net model is utilized to restore wavefront directly from the plenoptic image of PWS. The simulation results show that the averaged root mean square error (RMSE) of residual wavefront is less than 1/14λ (Marechal criterion), proving the proposed method successfully breaks through the non-linear problem existed in PWS wavefront sensing. In addition, our model performs better than the recently developed deep learning models and traditional modal approach. Furthermore, the robustness of our model to turbulence strength and signal level is also tested, proving the good generalizability of our model. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to perform direct wavefront detection with a deep-learning-based method in PWS-based applications and achieve the state-of-the-art performance.