Abstract
A lateral-shearing interferogram shows a contour map of a difference between a wave front under test and a sheared wave front, that is, a contour map of a derivative of the wave front under test. Therefore one can reconstruct the shape of the wave front under test by analyzing that difference. The Saunders method reconstructs a wavefront. However the wavefront data are reconstructed only at intervals of an amount of shear along a direction of the shear. Therefore the method has low spatial resolution. A method for reconstructing a wave front that is based on the Saunders method and has high spatial resolution is proposed. The proposed method analyzes the differences that are produced by shearing of the wave front under test in several amounts. In this paper, the method is described, and its validity is confirmed by simulation.