Direct wavefront reconstruction with the cone wavefront sensor using the inverse radon transform

Abstract

The cone wavefront sensor consists of a cone (or axicon) placed at the focal plane of the imaging system, from which an annular intensity image is formed. Typically, the wavefront phase is estimated using inversion of an interaction matrix relating the intensity image to different aberration modes. In this paper, we show that the intensity image for the cone wavefront sensor is related to the radon transform of the wavefront phase. A reconstruction method using the inverse radon transform (filtered back-projection) is shown to be able to directly approximate the wavefront phase without the need for an interaction matrix for small wavefront aberrations.