Application of improved speckle contouring technique to surface roughness measurements

One of the well known drawbacks in Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry (ESPI) is the poor fringe density due to electronic and speckle noise and decreasing fringe visibility with increasing speckle decorrelation. As recently reported we suggested improving the fringe density and enlarging the measurement range by the incremental addition of phase images. The technique has already been successfully applied to in-plane and out-of-plane displacement field measurements of carbon-fibre reinforced. composites. This paper demonstrates how the technique can be used to improve the sensitivity and to extend the measurement range for speckle contouring applications. The angular correlation of the speckle phase images is used to get the desired 30 information of the investigated object surface. It is demonstrated how the angular speckle contouring techinque can easily be automated with respect, for example, to possible industrial applications. Roughness measurements are carried out on milled Rugo test surfaces. All measurements are performed without the usual vibration isolation, and of course, without the treatment of the surface with fine, white powder for contrast enhancement, which would falsify the results. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.