Angle-Based Neuromorphic Wave Normal Sensing

Abstract

Angle-based wavefront sensing has a rich historical background in measuring optical aberrations. The Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor is widely employed in adaptive optics systems due to its high optical efficiency and high robustness. However, simultaneously achieving high sensitivity and large dynamic range is still challenging, limiting the performance of diagnosing fast-changing turbulence. To overcome this limitation, angle-based neuromorphic wave normal sensing, which serves as a differentiable framework developed on the asynchronous event modality is proposed. Herein, it is illustrated that the emerging computational neuromorphic imaging paradigm enables a direct perception of a high-dimensional wave normal from the highly efficient temporal diversity measurement. To the best of available knowledge, the proposed scheme is the first to successfully surpass the spot-overlapping issue caused by the curvature constraint in classical angle-based wavefront sensing setups under challenging dynamic scenarios.