Recovery of wavefront from multi-shear interferograms with different tilts.

An improved multi-shear algorithm is proposed to reconstruct a two-dimensional wavefront from multiple phase differences measured by lateral shearing interferograms with different tilts. The effects of the tilt errors in the wavefront are analyzed and a compensation method is developed. Unbiased estimators are added to Fourier coefficients of the phase differences to eliminate the tilt errors adaptively. The algorithm is immune to the tilt errors and the wavefront under test can be recovered exactly. Computer simulation and optical test demonstrated that the proposed algorithm has higher recovery accuracy than the existing multi-shear algorithms.