DIGITAL HETERODYNE TOPOGRAPHY (MOIRE, CONTOURING, PROFILOMETRY).

Abstract

Digital heterodyne methods are employed in conjunction with periodic fringe projection to produce a fast automated surface relief measurement technique. A method of sampling the image with a solid state detector array which produces a moire fringe image free of the noise terms normally present with moire techniques is presented along with an extension to Whittaker-Shannon sampling theory to cover the moire aliasing phenomena. The limitations imposed on the surface slopes by the requirement that the properly moire sampled image spectra must be confined to a moire interval are given. Moire sampling allows an optical processing step (removal of the reference surface tilt), while classical nonaliased sampling produces the same information with respect to a tilted surface. General additive noise is analyzed as regards both integrating bucket and phase stepping algorithms and yields a signal to noise ratio dependent error with twice the frequency of the fringes for some algorithms. A phase averaging technique which eliminates these oscillatory errors as well as those caused by reference phase shift errors in all the algorithms is demonstrated. Both parallel and divergent geometries are discussed. The feasibility is experimentally demonstrated with results for the parallel case based on a system composed of commercially obtainable components.