Retrieval of wave aberration from point spread function or optical transfer function data

This paper describes the digital retrieval method of the wave aberration of an optical system from the point spread function or the optical transfer function data of the system. The Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm is used as the iterative retrieval technique of the wave aberration with additional information about the type of aberration. The usefulness of the proposed method is confirmed by computer simulations. Several problems associated with the retrieval procedure are indicated by elementary experiments with a computer generated hologram as well as by computer simulations.