Wavefront Aberration Measurement Deflectometry for Imaging Lens Tests

Lenses play an important role in imaging systems. Having an effective way to test the aberrations of imaging lenses is important. However, the existing methods cannot satisfy the requirements in some conditions. To overcome these difficulties, wavefront aberration measurement deflectometry (WAMD) is proposed in this paper, which can reconstruct the wavefront aberrations of imaging lenses by measuring the angular aberrations. The principle of WAMD is analyzed in detail, and the correctness and feasibility of the proposed method are verified by both a simulation and an experiment. A telephoto lens and a single imaging lens were tested in an experiment, and the RMS errors were 166.8 nm (5.71%) and 58.9 nm (4.74%), respectively, as compared with the interferometer's results. This method is widely applicable with relatively reasonable accuracy. It has potential to be applied in the lens manufacturing and alignment process.