Evaluating the improvement of atmospheric aberration corrections with the use of Adaptive Optics: Enabling inter-island communication through quantum encrypted optical communications

IAC will be developing a new Transportable Optical Ground Station (TOGS). It is a telescope that is intended to be used for quantum key distribution in a number of events. Using AO for free-space propagation stabilises the optical signal on a detector significantly, and maximises the received signal by returning near-diffraction limited...

Characterizations of Deformable Mirror in a Sensorless Adaptive Optics System

Deformable Mirror (DM) is the key part in the AO system. Characterization of DM is important as it maps between input voltage signal and output mirror deformation. The precision of characterization largely affects the control performance. While characterizing the DM with wavefront sensors is easy and straightforward, there is very few research...

Design and Control of a Portable AO System: A Continuous Model Based Approach

In the field of Adaptive Optics (AO) a new development has been introduced recently: the Wavefront Sensorless Adaptive Optics (WFSless AO) approach, which only uses camera measurements to optimize image quality and does not use a Shack-Hartman (SH) Wavefront Sensor (WFS) [Booth, 2006, Débarre et al., 2009, Hinnen et al., 2008]. In order to...

Extended Scene Deep Learning Wavefront Sensing for Real Time Image Deconvolution

Ground based telescope imaging suffers from interference from the earth’s atmosphere. Fluctuations in the refractive index of the air delay incoming light randomly, resulting in blurred images. A deconvolution from wavefront sensing system is an adaptive optics system that measures the modes in which the light is corrupted (i.e. the wavefront)...

The Plenoptic Sensor for Smart Anisoplanatic Aberration Correction: Simulated Performance in MATLAB

Turbulent layers high in the atmosphere cause anisoplanatic phase aberrations, that are responsible for image degradation [6, 33, 46]. Adaptive Optics (AO) aims to correct for these aberrations by sensing them with a wavefront sensor and performing the correction with phase conjugate devices [18]. Various wavefront sensors have been designed and...

Deep Learning Wavefront Sensing: Via Raw Shack-Hartmann Images

The Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC) 'Smart Optics' aim to achieve higher resolution imaging through Adaptive Optics (AO). Adaptive optics is a modern technique for detecting and correcting real-time wavefront aberrations and is widely used in biomedical imaging and astronomical imaging. Wavefront sensing lies at the core of Adaptive...

Data-Driven Filtering for Large-Scale Adaptive Optics

The visualization of objects within or beyond a turbulent medium is hampered by the aberrations the medium induces in the wavefront. The sharpness of an image is maximal when the incoming wavefront is flat, with aberrated wavefronts yielding distorted images of limited utility. In the particular case of astronomy, the flat wavefront of the light...

Tensor Network Kalman Filter for Large-Scale MIMO Systems: With Application to Adaptive Optics

For large-scale system with tens of thousands of states and outputs the computation in the conventional Kalman filter becomes time-consuming such that Kalman filtering in large-scale real-time application is practically infeasible. A possible mathematical framework to lift the curse of dimensionality is to lift the problem in higher dimensions...

Robust optimal sensor placement for optimal estimation: A framework and application to adaptive optics

The goal of this thesis is to present a framework which can be used to optimize the observer and controller performance by placement of sensors and actuators on a continuous domain. The framework provides choices of model structure, cost functions and optimization methods to perform the placement. Systems which would be suitable for the use of...

Adaptive Optics with Curvature Wavefront Sensor

When acquiring information using imaging techniques, one wants to achieve the best possible resolution in order to obtain valuable results. In the ideal scenario the size of the smallest resolved object features is limited by the wave properties of light, with a number of techniques developed to overcome this limit. In real life measurements the...

Optimization techniques for electromagnetic deformable mirrors

The resolution of ground-based telescopes is limited by the blurring caused by Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. Adaptive Optics (AO) is a technique used to correct atmospheric distortions, restoring images to diffraction-limited resolution. The main element of an AO system is the Deformable Mirror (DM), which compensates the distortions of the...

Recursive Kronecker-based Vector Auto-Regressive identification for large-scale Adaptive Optics systems

Adaptive Optics (AO) play an essential role in the field of astronomical seeing for ground-based telescopes, providing a corrected image from the disturbance caused by the light having to travel through the turbulent atmosphere of our Earth. To provide us with more detailed images, the sizes of these telescopes are getting increasingly larger....

Distributed Wavefront Reconstruction for Adaptive Optics Systems

We are currently facing an increasing amount of challenges in the area of photonics as more and more applications in need for active “photon control” sprout in different fields of science. Adaptive Optics (AO) is the subject which deals with measuring, reconstructing, and reshaping the phase of a photon wavefront in real-time and can, thus,...