Sub-aperture optical system testing by using of a modified simulateous fit method

Sub-aperture stitching interferometry can be used for measurement of wavefront of large aperture optical system. A variety of sub-aperture stitching algorithms have been studied to reconstruct the sub-aperture data to obtain full aperture wavefront. The simultaneous fitting method plays an important role among those stitching algorithms which uses a series of global polynomials to accomplish the fitting of the test wavefronts, however, it can only be applied in the case of there have no overlap between each sub-apertures. Therefore, a modified simultaneous fitting method is proposed and is applied to measure the wavefront of large aperture optical system. The proposed algorithm is applicable whether there exists overlap between each sub-aperture or not. The numerical simulation is carried out to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm. Further, a practical stitching experiment that test an optical system with a diameter of 850mm was implemented to demonstrate the modified algorithm.