Abstract: Traditional schemes for Shack-Hartmann wavefront reconstruction can be classified into zonal and modal methods. The zonal methods are good at reconstructing the local details of the wavefront, but are sensitive to the noise in the slope data. The modal methods are much more robust to the noise, but they have limited capability of recovering the local details of the wavefront. In this paper, a B-spline based fast wavefront reconstruction algorithm in which the wavefront is expanded to the linear combination of bi-variable B-spline curved surfaces is proposed. Then, a method based on successive over relaxation (SOR) algorithm is proposed to fast reconstruct the wavefront. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can recover the local details of the wavefront as good as the zonal methods, while is much more robust to the slope noise.