Abstract

Peak-to-valley is entrenched in optics design and manufacture as a characterization of optical figure; modern interferometers commonly use 1k x 1k detectors – the output of which may not be well represented by 2 points. PVr is a proposed robust amplitude parameter which combines the peak-to-valley of a 36 term Zernike fit and the rms of the residual. This provides automatic filtering, is insensitive to system resolution, and can be related to imaging performance. This paper recommends the use of PVr instead of PV.

© 2008 Optical Society of America