Comparative study of computational methods for wavefront fitting

Zernike polynomials are one of the major tools in optical design applications ranging from modeling optical surfaces to representing wavefronts. We present a comparative analysis of cubic B-spline model as an alternative to classical Zernike polynomials representation, and compare the efficacy of each representation over a set of different sampling grids, when applied to complex wavefront fitting. The results show that effectiveness of fit using cubic B-spline is better as compared to traditional Zernike polynomials. Furthermore we show that sampling grid type limiting the efficacy of computation Zernike coefficients as compared to B-spline control points. We also implement cubic B-spline fitting for efficient tracing of light fields by geometrical optics.