Wavefront processor for liquid crystal adaptive optics system based on Graphics Processing Unit

To process real-time wavefront signal in our liquid crystal adaptive optics system (LCAOS), a real-time wavefront processor (RTWP) with graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator is developed. A series of parallel acceleration algorithm is implemented to reconstruct wavefront, compute gray map and process lookup table (LUT). Especially, an algorithm by using symmetry of Zernike polynomial is designed to compute gray map and it provides a speedup of 3.16. Finally, the total computing time in our RTWP is 109 μs and temporal bandwidth in our LCAOS is 45 Hz; it is shown that our RTWP has the ability to real time process wavefront signal in our LCAOS.