Variational method for integrating radial gradient field

•We propose a variational method for wavefront recovering using the information obtained from a circular fringe pattern.•The proposed numerical solution results on a very simple algorithm which can be implemented with several computational efficient techniques.•An extra advantage of the proposed method is its feasibility to be implemented on a parallel computer allowing to reduce processing times.

We propose a variational method for integrating information obtained from circular fringe pattern. The proposed method is a suitable choice for objects with radial symmetry. First, we analyze the information contained in the fringe pattern captured by the experimental setup and then move to formulate the problem of recovering the wavefront using techniques from calculus of variations. The performance of the method is demonstrated by numerical experiments with both synthetic and real data.