Improving wavefront reconstruction accuracy in lateral shearing interferometry using a phase-driven shear correction method

To address the problem of inaccurate shear estimation caused by insufficient interferogram quality, this paper proposes a phase-driven shear correction method that effectively enhances the accuracy of wavefront reconstruction. The method treats the phase extracted from the actual interferogram as the optimization target and regards the shear amount as the variable. By iteratively updating the shear amount, the simulated phases corresponding to different shear amounts progressively approach the actual phase, thereby achieving simultaneous optimization of shear estimation and wavefront reconstruction. To validate the proposed approach, interferograms with varying shear amounts were simulated, and the method was applied to correct the shear amount. The results demonstrate that the method consistently converges to the actual shear amount under different shearing conditions and significantly enhances reconstruction accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to traditional methods, the proposed method reduces the peak-to-valley deviation from the ZYGO reference from 0.0454<i>λ</i> to 0.0255<i>λ</i>, thereby fully verifying its accuracy and reliability.