Refractive error sensing from wavefront slopes.

The problem of measuring the objective refractive error with an aberrometer has shown to be more elusive than expected. Here, the formalism of differential geometry is applied to develop a theoretical framework of refractive error sensing. At each point of the pupil, the local refractive error is given by the wavefront curvature, which is a 2 × 2 symmetric matrix, whose elements are directly related to sphere, cylinder, and axis. Aberrometers usually measure the local gradient of the wavefront. Then refractive error sensing consists of differentiating the gradient, instead of integrating as in wavefront sensing. A statistical approach is proposed to pass from the local to the global (clinically meaningful) refractive error, in which the best correction is assumed to be the maximum likelihood estimation. In the practical implementation, this corresponds to the mode of the joint histogram of the 3 different elements of the curvature matrix. Results obtained both in computer simulations and with real data provide a close agreement and consistency with the main optical image quality metrics such as the Strehl ratio.