Wavefront fitting with discrete orthogonal polynomials in a unit radius circle

Abstract

Zernike polynomials have been used for some time to fit wavefront deformation measurements to a two-dimensional polynomial. Their orthogonality properties make them ideal for this kind of application. The typical procedure consists of first obtaining the fitting using x-y polynomials and then transforming them to Zernike polynomials by means of a matrix multiplication. Here, we present a new method for making this fitting faster by using a set of orthogonal polynomials on a discrete base of data points on a unitary circle.