Method for improving measurement efficiency of lateral shearing interferometry

The computation time of wavefront reconstruction is decreased by sampling the difference fronts in the present study. The wavefront can be reconstructed with high accuracy up to 64 Zernike terms with only 32×32 sampled pixels. Furthermore, the computational efficiency can be improved by a factor of more than 1000, and the measurement efficiency of lateral shearing interferometry is improved. The influence of the terms used to reconstruct the wavefront, the grid size of the test wavefront, the shear ratio, and the random noise on the reconstruction accuracy is analyzed and compared, when the difference fronts are sampled with different grid sizes. Numerical simulations and experiments show that the relative reconstruction error is <5% if the grid size of the sampled difference fronts is more than four times the radial order of difference Zernike polynomials with a reasonable noise level and shear ratio.