Validation of event-based wavefront sensor test bed using wave optics simulations

This study develops a simulation of an event-based Shack-Hartman wavefront sensor, to assess its viability for reconstructing varying aberrated wavefronts in controlled optical systems. The simulation replicates the architecture of our AFRL adaptive optics testbed, using GNU Octave to model Gaussian beam propagation, Zernike phase distortion, lenslet sampling, and event generation. Synthetic event data is generated using the V2E (video-to-events) software and processed through a pseudoinverse fitting algorithm to reconstruct the original wavefront. The simulation provides a controlled comparison of event-based sensors and frame-based systems, evaluating their ability to reconstruct phase structure while avoiding frame averaging and exposure-related artifacts. This effort characterizes how accurately such sensors can be modeled and reconstructed in simulation and establishes a basis for comparing asynchronous and frame-based wavefront sensing methods under similar optical conditions on the testbed to evaluate the sensor’s response to varying aberrated inputs. The findings will contribute to understanding of the event-based technology by establishing how accurately these systems can be simulated and reconstructed under controlled optical conditions.