Reference Wave Design for Wavefront Sensing

One of the classical results in wavefront sensing is phase-shifting point diffraction interferometry (PS-PDI), where the phase of a wavefront is measured by interfering it with a planar reference created from the incident wave itself. The limiting drawback of this approach is that the planar reference, often created by passing light through a narrow pinhole, is dim and noise sensitive. We address this limitation with a novel approach called ReWave that uses a non-planar reference that is designed to be brighter. The reference wave is designed in a specific way that would still allow for analytic phase recovery, exploiting ideas of sparse phase retrieval algorithms. ReWave requires only four image intensity measurements and is significantly more robust to noise compared to PS-PDI. We validate the robustness and applicability of our approach using a suite of simulated and real results.