Zernike mode analysis for advanced wavefront imaging

Wavefront sensing is a powerful technique to assess and quantify the aberrations present in optical systems. Turning this idea around and assuming an ideal optical system, it can also be used to accurately measure the three-dimensional shape of transparent or reflecting objects placed inside the optical setup. Subsequent processing of the obtained images often involves the separation of low and high frequency spatial modes, which for the case of circular objects or pupils are conventionally taken to be Zernike polynomials. In this work we develop fast and highly parallel algorithms to accurately compute the Zernike mode coefficients of a given wavefront image. We then extend this method to improve the performance in the more complicated and realistic cases when the pupil or the object are not perfectly circular.