Non-null testing for aspheric surfaces using elliptical sub-aperture stitching technique

We propose an elliptical sub-aperture stitching (ESAS) method to measure the aspheric surfaces. In our method, the non-null configuration is used to overcome the disadvantages of the null testing. By adding the dynamic tilt, the different local nearly null fringe patterns are obtained and the corresponding phase data in the elliptical masks is extracted with negligible retrace errors. In order to obtain the full aperture result, a stitching algorithm is developed to stitch all the phase data together. We firstly show the principle of our method. Then the performance of the proposed method is analyzed by simulation experiments. In the end, practical examples are given to demonstrate the correctness of the proposed method. The stitching result shows a good agreement with the full-aperture null testing result.