Real-time air turbulence calibration of large aperture camera image quality measurement system

When measuring image qualities of large aperture cameras, many factors like people moving around, blowing of air conditioners outlets, thermal convection, etc., will give rise to air turbulence (AT). AT mainly induces non-uniform distribution of air components in the image chain of large aperture camera image quality measurement systems, which will lead to variations of system wavefront errors. Thus, AT will introduce errors to measurement results of traditional image quality evaluation methods. Those errors increase with the camera aperture and are usually time-varying. This paper proposes a method to calibrate AT in real time when measuring image qualities of large aperture cameras. A defocused star point target (DSPT) is added to traditional test targets (TTT). The camera under test can capture images of TTT and DSPT simultaneously. The distance between the effective area of TTT and the DSPT is carefully designed so that the corresponding images do not overlap with each other. We calibrate AT induced wavefront errors by processing the DSPT images with phase retrieval method. Experimental results of AT induced wavefront errors calibrated by the proposed method are presented.