Fast PSF Synthesis with Defocused and Spherical Aberration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, wave-based method for synthesizing optical PSFs under defocus and spherical aberration, significantly accelerating computation while maintaining accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a novel approximate closed-form solution for the diffraction integral, enabling a linear-complexity PSF simulator with substantial speed improvements.

Findings

Achieves up to 2x speedup over Hankel-based methods

Achieves up to 4x speedup over FFT-based methods

Closely matches wave-optical PSFs in accuracy

Abstract

Accurately estimating the point spread function (PSF) of an optical system requires solving free-space wave propagation, which entails evaluating a diffraction integral. This integral is traditionally computed numerically using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) or Hankel Transform, as it lacks a closed-form solution. We show that, under defocus and spherical aberration, the diffraction integral admits an approximate closed-form solution by combining a piecewise Bessel approximation with Gaussian-type integrals. Based on this result, we develop a fast wave-based PSF simulator with linear complexity in the radial resolution. The proposed, un-optimized simulator achieves up to a 2x speedup over Hankel-based integration and a 4x speedup over FFT while closely matching wave-optical PSFs, enabling efficient large-scale depth-of-field synthesis.