Improving retinal imaging by corneal refractive index matching.

Imaging the retina at high resolution requires a dilated pupil, which in turn exposes more corneal irregularities. We diminish the optical errors of the cornea by refractive index matching. Lens-fitted goggles were used for corneal immersion, to reduce its aberrations, while keeping the ocular power. An additional aspheric plate reduced the residual ocular spherical aberration. A comparison of the index-matching-based retinal images with those acquired directly shows resolution improvement for subjects with normal extent of ocular aberrations. A simulation of the point spread function, obtained from an averaged ocular and corneal wavefront error, also reveals substantial improvement when using corneal index matching. The demonstrated improvement using index matching may enable further improvement of current retinal imaging techniques or relaxing requirements for active ocular aberration correction.

Estimation of the ocular point spread function by retina modeling.

Retinal imaging often suffers from blurring aberrations. With knowledge of the blurring point spread function (PSF), better images can be reconstructed by deconvolution techniques. We demonstrate a method to enhance the contrast of retinal cells by estimating the ocular PSF. This is done by finding the cells' positions and their intensity distributions and using these as a model for the image. The feasibility of this method is demonstrated by Wiener deconvolution both for adaptively and nonadaptively corrected images.

Retinal glial cells enhance human vision acuity.

We construct a light-guiding model of the retina outside the fovea, in which an array of glial (Muller) cells permeates the depth of the retina down to the photoreceptors. Based on measured refractive indices, we propagate light to obtain a significant increase of the intensity at the photoreceptors. For pupils up to 6 mm width, the coupling between neighboring cells is only a few percent. Low cross talk over the whole visible spectrum also explains the insensitivity to chromatic aberrations of the eye. The retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images.

Simple beam combination for stellar interferometry.

In stellar interferometry, image quality improves significantly with the inclusion of more telescopes and the use of phase closure. We demonstrate, using first coherent and then partially coherent white light, a compact and efficient pairwise combination of 12 or more beams. The input beams are lined up and spread through a cylindrical lens into a comb of parallel ellipses, which interferes with a perpendicular copy of itself to form a matrix of interferograms between all pairs. The diagonal elements show interference of each beam with itself, for intensity calibration. The measured white-light visibilities were high and stable.

Measurement of the spatial response of a detector pixel.

In order to measure the internal spatial response of a pixel in a detector, it is scanned by a beam smaller than its size. This becomes difficult as the wave length grows and becomes comparable to the pixel size, such as in the infra red. To overcome this difficulty, a special phase mask which makes the beam narrower was designed, constructed, and tested successfully. The mask was made from five alternating transparent rings, where the rings had half a wave phase difference between them. The beam was scanned with and without the mask in two dimensions in fine steps by a much smaller detector and its response was taken. The spot width dropped by 19% at half its height and by 42% at tenth its height, a significant narrowing. The scan was repeated with the full detector pixel. That beam scan served as a deconvolution kernel and allowed us to find the pixel point spread function (spatial response), the pixel modulation transfer function and the optical cross talk between the pixels.

Simulated annealing in ocular adaptive optics.

We present what is to our knowledge a first hardware realization of a simulated annealing algorithm in an adaptive optics system designed to image the retina of the human eye. The algorithm is applied to the retinal image itself without the need for wavefront sensors in the system. We find that this optimization algorithm can be an alternative to the traditional Hartmann-Shack sensing. We also compare the simulated annealing algorithm to the stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithm.

Harnessing caustics for wave-front sensing.

Scintillation in measured wave fronts adds spurious dislocations and deformations to their reconstruction. The source of the problem is caustics formed by aberrations in intermediate planes. I propose to use intentional caustics to measure wave fronts under severe conditions such as low light level, fast scale variations, large aberrations, and discontinuities in the wave front. A simple realization is based on the Hartmann-Shack sensor, which samples the wave front with a lenslet array. Movement of the lenslets' foci is linear with slope changes. Here the lenslets are effectively formed in an acousto-optic device: Two standing waves are launched perpendicularly to the light beam and to each other. At some distance down the beam, each wave creates a comb of caustics, and the two orthogonal combs add up to an array of caustic spots. The spatial frequency of the array is linear with the temporal frequency of the standing sound waves. A simple Fourier demodulation scheme supplies the two wave-front gradients.

Stellar scintillations as a remote atmospheric wave-front sensor.

Stellar scintillations are considered noise in adaptive-optics sensors and are measured for calibration purposes only. We propose to use scintillations to provide direct instantaneous information about the structure of the atmosphere. As a result it will be possible to increase the field of view provided by adaptive optics. The scintillation pattern is created when stellar light is diffracted by high-altitude turbulence. Alternatively, this pattern can be viewed as a Laplacian of this turbulence and can thus be inverted to estimate it. The measurement is limited by the intensity and the angular size of the reference star, by the height distribution of the atmospheric turbulence, and by the detector resolution and spectral response.

Atmospheric tomography using a fringe pattern in the sodium layer.

We wish to measure and separate the contribution of atmospheric turbulent layers for multiconjugate adaptive optics. To this end, we propose to create a periodic fringe pattern in the sodium layer and image it with a modified Hartmann sensor. Overlapping sections of the fringes are imaged by a lenslet array onto contiguous areas in a large-format camera. Low-layer turbulence causes an overall shift of the fringe pattern in each lenslet, and high-attitude turbulence results in internal deformations in the pattern. Parallel Fourier analysis permits separation of the atmospheric layers. Two mirrors, one conjugate to a ground layer and the other conjugate to a single high-altitude layer, are shown to widen the field of view significantly compared with existing methods.

Interference microscopy and Fourier fringe analysis applied to measuring the spatial refractive-index distribution.

We have applied the technique of Fourier fringe analysis to microscopic interferograms of needle crystals that grow from a solution. We use a differential technique in which an empty field interferogram is compared with one that contains distortion and obscuration by the growing crystal, and we demonstrate both analytically and experimentally a phase shift sensitivity of 0.01 fringe with a spatial resolution of half of a fringe spacing (~1 µm). Following the analysis of the interferogram in two dimensions, we show that the three-dimensional refractive-index field around the crystal can be deduced, assuming that it is axially symmetric, by an iterative method.