A study on a fast measuring technique of wavefront using a Shack–Hartmann sensor

The measuring resolution and speed for wavefront are important to improve the performance of an adaptive optics system. In this paper, we propose a fast measuring technique with high resolution in the Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor. The proposed measuring technique of wavefront combines the conventional center of mass algorithm with an estimated weighting factor. The estimated weighting factor is a real value anticipating the real center of mass in a wavefront spot image. This estimated weighting factor can be calculated at the initialization step of an adaptive optics system. We designed a robust adaptive optics system with this proposed measuring algorithm. The measuring accuracy and speed are investigated by using the proposed algorithm compared with the conventional center of mass algorithm in experiments.