Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor based on an industrial smart camera

Wavefront sensing is important in many optical measurement systems and adaptive optics. The speed of the wavefront sensor determines the achievable temporal resolution of dynamic measurements and the bandwidth of adaptive optics systems. In this paper we propose a versatile high-speed Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor based on an industrial smart camera. The sensor uses a parallel processing scheme for high-speed measurement of wavefront deformations and offers runtime reconfiguration. An FPGA based centroid detection is presented, adding an overall time delay of only 380ns. The wavefront estimation is demonstrated on an external PC using zonal and modal reconstruction.