Estimating the point spread function of an imaging system using wavefront measurement

An imaging system is constructed by atmosphere turbulence and ground-based telescope when the latter is used to observe a space object. The wavefront measurement produced by adaptive optics system can be used to estimate the point spread function (PSF) of the imaging system since it contains the wavefront aberration information of the light from the object. But the detector noise of the wavefront sensor (WFS) will inevitably bring estimation error. Based on the statistical theory, a method is presented to improve the PSF estimation accuracy by eliminating the noise error from the wavefront measurement. The numerical simulation shows that the estimation error of this method could be lower than 10%. It also indicates that the higher the signal-noise ratio (SNR) of the WFS is, the more frames of the wavefront measurements are used, and the bigger the Fried constant is, the more accurate the estimation will be. The work in this paper can be applied to performance evaluation of imaging system, deconvolution of AO images, as well as photometric analysis of space object.