An efficient pipeline wavefront phase recovery for the CAFADIS camera for extremely large telescopes

Area of Science:

• Optical Engineering
• Computational Imaging
• Astronomy Instrumentation

Background:

• Wavefront phase recovery is crucial for high-resolution imaging, particularly in astronomy.
• Existing methods face computational challenges, especially for real-time applications like adaptive optics (AO).
• The CAFADIS camera, a novel plenoptic sensor, offers simultaneous wavefront and distance measurements.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a fast, specialized hardware implementation of the wavefront phase recovery algorithm.
• To leverage the CAFADIS camera and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) for real-time AO applications.
• To evaluate the performance of a novel FPGA-based 2D Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) implementation.

Main Methods:

• Implementation of a wavefront phase recovery pipeline algorithm on FPGA.
• Utilizing the CAFADIS plenoptic camera for simultaneous wavefront and distance data acquisition.
• Development and application of a novel FPGA-based 2D Fast Fourier Transform (2D-FFT) algorithm.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated a fast, specialized hardware implementation for wavefront phase recovery.
• Achieved real-time processing capabilities suitable for AO systems.
• Showcased the efficiency of the FPGA-based 2D-FFT compared to other implementations.

Conclusions:

• The FPGA implementation of the wavefront phase recovery algorithm using the CAFADIS camera is highly efficient.
• This approach addresses processing time requirements for adaptive optics in Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs).
• The novel FPGA 2D-FFT offers a significant advancement in computational speed for optical systems.