Ms. Anitta Jomy, a Research Scholar in the Applied and Adaptive Optics Laboratory, Department of Physics, working under the supervision of Dr. Dinesh N. Naik and Dr. Biswajit Pathak, has been awarded the OPTICA Best Oral Presentation Award at the International Conference, Frontiers in Optics and Photonics (FOP 2026), jointly organized by IIT Delhi and CSIR-NPL from September 25 to 28, 2026. Mr. Aryan Chand (Dual Degree, Optical Engineering) is a co-author in this work and has contributed significantly.The present work introduces a novel image quality metric parameter (QMP) derived from the spatial intensity distribution co-occurrence matrix for holographic modal wavefront sensing (HMWS) that overcomes a number of serious limitations associated with the conventional approach, including reliance on the location of the focal point spread function, detector aperture diameter, and biased values. Such a programmable HMWS system establishes the groundwork for next-generation wavefront sensing technologies that have wider applications in free-space optical communication and adaptive optics. The work was recently published in the prestigious (Q1) Optics journal, Optics Letters (Link: https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.591080).