• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.383-390
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• 2006

The SharkHartmann wavefront sensors are the most popular devices to measure wavefront in the field of adaptive optics. The Shack-Hartmann sensors measure the centroids of spot irradiance distribution formed by each corresponding micro-lens. The centroids are linearly proportional to the local mean slopes of the wavefront defined within the corresponding sub-aperture. The wavefront is then reconstructed from the evaluated local mean slopes. The uncertainty of the Shack-Hartmann sensor is caused by various factors including the detector noise, the limited size of the detector, the magnitude and profile of spot irradiance distribution, etc. This paper investigates the noise propagation in two major centroid evaluation algorithms through computer simulation; 1st order moments of the irradiance algorithms i.e. center of gravity algorithm, and correlation algorithm. First, the center of gravity algorithm is shown to have relatively large dependence on the magnitudes of noises and the shape & size of irradiance sidelobes, whose effects are also shown to be minimized by optimal thresholding. Second, the correlation algorithm is shown to be robust over those effects, while its measurement accuracy is vulnerable to the size variation of the reference spot. The investigation is finally confirmed by experimental measurements of defocus wavefront aberrations using a Shack-Hartmann sensor using those two algorithms.