SciAO: Scilab/Scicos Adaptive Optics

There are a large number of softwares that can execute adaptive optics simulation. Most of them,such as WaveTrain and CAOS, are commercial or proprietary products, and their inner mechanism are not known to other researchers (AlthoughCAOS is  an open sourced software, but it is implemented in the IDL, which is proprietary). Some other simulation softwares (LightPipes, Arroyo,etc.) are open source, while these code are almost all written in FORTRAN, or C/C++, and they have not good interfaces for other people to use. Many of today’s codes (e.g. AOtools developed by tOSC) are written entirely or partly in Matlab, which has the advantages of an extensive library of math routines, very fast matrix operations, plenty of other toolboxes and very vell graphical outputs. The main limitations of Matlab are the cost of the licenses and the slow speed for non-matrix iterative calculations.

SciAO is an open source, cross-platform, and user-friendly toolbox based on the Scilab / Scicos environment for modeling and simulation of wave optics, especially the adaptive optics system.Although this toolbox is mainly be designed to satisfy the requirement of AO simulations, we also moderately consider the needs to some other optics simulation system (e.g. the simulation of general Wave optics and imaging devises) and designed some software modules for them, so this toolbox can also be used to simulating other optics problems beyond the AO field.

Most of the programs of our SciAO toolbox are written by C/C++ language or based on some excellent open source C/C++ libraries, so it is efficient and cross-platform. At the same time, we also fully make use of the powerful graphical and interface program ability, especially the dynamic modeler and simulator (Scicos ) of the Scilab environment, so it is very easy for other researchers or beginners to learn and use this toolbox to simulate their peculiar adaptive or other optical problems. Our toolbox will be released under open-sourced GPL license and all other people who are interested in this software can download, modify, or use it if they abide this license.

In developing this tool we did not "reinvent the wheels". All of the basic techniques and algorithms used in wave optics which had already been implemented and tested for previous wave optics codes, and all of the open-source code which we can acquire, can be used by our toolbox. Where it made sense, we used the legacy or open-source code directly. In some cases minor modifications were needed to satisfy integration requirements, and in some cases it was simpler to rewrite the code. For open-source codes which we have used in SciAO, we refer to Arroyo and LightPipes. (We have made some amall modification to their original codes in order to let them accord with Scilab / Scicos environment, or let them be able to cross-platform run under Microsoft Windows and Gnu/Linux.) The authors Dr.Matthew Britton and Dr.Gleb Vdovin for developing thease excellent software packages.

Other Dependencies

• scilab v4.0
• fftw v3.0
• cfitsio v2.401
• lapack v3.0+

• SciAO 0.2.5 released

  12 Sep 2006
  
  This is the first release of the SciAO toolbox.
  [Read more/0 comments]

• Main Scicos-blocks of SciAO (version 0.2.5)
• Main Scilab functions of SciAO (version 0.2.5)
• A paper (pdf file) to explain the contents of SciAO

• developer: Chen jingyuan
• other contributors: Gan guangyong, Tao yingxue, Zhang jiangzhu, etc.

• Scilab: http://www.scilab.org
• Scicos: http://www.scicos.org
• fftw: http://www.fftw.org
• lapack: http://www.netlib.org/lapack
• cfitsio: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/fitsio/fitsio.html
• Arroyo: http://eraserhead.caltech.edu/arroyo/arroyo.html
• lightPipes: http://www.okotech.com/software/lightpipes
• SciAO: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sciao