The impact of speckle on the measurement of eye aberrations

We report the results of modeling the speckle structure of an optical field, which arises due to scattering of laser radiation at the retina of the human eye. The presence of such a speckle structure in the scattered radiation leaving the eye affects the accuracy of wavefront measurements aimed at determining the overall aberrations of the eye. We compared two methods for suppressing such speckle structures based on spatial and spectral averaging of a variety of speckle field realizations. The results of both theoretical calculations and numerical simulations appeared to be in a good agreement with experimental data obtained with the eye model and in vivo.