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Real-Time Megapixel Kilohertz Neuromorphic Shack-Hartmann Wavefront Sensor

Optics 2026-07-28 v1

Abstract

Conventional frame-based Shack--Hartmann wavefront sensors (SHWFS) are limited by dynamic range and the intrinsic trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution, while high-bandwidth acquisition poses additional challenges for real-time wavefront reconstruction. This work presents a real-time, megapixel, kilohertz neuromorphic SHWFS to overcome these limitations. In static optical metrology, the proposed pipeline achieves one-shot wavefront acquisition under extreme illumination non-uniformity, reaching a dynamic range of 260 dB at a 20 Hz acquisition frequency. Owing to this high dynamic range and the concomitant high-intensity resolution, wavefront reconstruction errors in dim and bright sub-apertures are reduced by 59\% and 70\%, respectively, relative to conventional frame-based SHWFS. For dynamic wavefront sensing, the system provides kilohertz-rate centroid tracking over a megapixel field of view with microsecond-scale latency. Centroid localization errors are 0.18 pixels during optical alignment supervision and 0.26 pixels in high-speed turbulence observation, verifying the accuracy and reliability of the system across dynamic scenarios. The per-sub-aperture processing throughput reaches 420,737 Hz on a standard CPU, demonstrating high-speed real-time computation without specialized hardware acceleration. Together, these results establish a unified neuromorphic SHWFS framework for high-fidelity one-shot static wavefront reconstruction and real-time high-bandwidth dynamic wavefront sensing.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.25281,
  title  = {Real-Time Megapixel Kilohertz Neuromorphic Shack-Hartmann Wavefront Sensor},
  author = {Yuhan Bao and Chenxin Shao and Kaiwei Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.25281},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages, 5 figures. Under review at Laser & Photonics Reviews