Influence of Stiles-Crawford effect apodization on spatial visual performance with decentered pupils

Using theoretical estimates of the optical-transfer function and line-spread function as image-quality criteria, we predicted the influence of the Stiles-Crawford effect (SCE) on both optical performance of the eye and subjective measurements of transverse aberrations when pupils are decentered. The SCE was modeled as a pupil apodization. The SCE appears to improve image quality by providing compensation for aberrations induced by pupil decentration, but this improvement is usually small. When a criterion of the placement of the image is used as the centroid of the line-spread function, an average SCE reduces the influence of pupil decentration on subjective transverse chromatic aberrations (TCA's) for 5-mm-diameter pupils by 30%. This reduction is much less than that obtained by previous experimental studies of TCA, and possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed. Decentering the SCE produces an appreciable shift in subjective TCA for 5-mm-diameter pupils of 1.4 arc min per 1-mm decentration (at wavelengths 433 and 622 nm).