Uniaxial High-Speed Micro-Scale Three-Dimensional Surface Topographical Measurements Using Fringe Projection

In-situ inspection has drawn many attentions in manufacturing due to the importance of quality assurance. Having an accurate and robust in-situ monitoring can assist corrective actions for a closed-loop control of a manufacturing process. The fringe projection technique, as a variation of the structured light technique, has demonstrated significant potential for real-time in-situ monitoring and inspection given its merits of conducting simultaneous high-speed and high accuracy measurements. However, high-speed 3D scanning methods like fringe projection technique are typically based on triangulation principle, meaning that the depth information is retrieved by analyzing the triangulation relationship between the light emitter (i.e., projector), the image receiver (i.e., camera) and the tested sample surface. Such measurement scheme cannot reconstruct 3D surfaces where large geometrical variations are present, such as a deep-hole or a stair geometry. This is because large geometrical variations will block the auxiliary light used in the triangulation based methods, which will resultantly cause a shadowed area to occur. In this paper, we propose a uniaxial fringe projection technique to address such limitation. We measured a stair model using both conventional triangulation-based fringe projection technique and the proposed method for comparison. Our experiment demonstrates that the proposed uniaxial fringe projection technique can perform high-speed 3D scanning without shadows appearing in the scene. Quantitative testing shows that an accuracy of 1.15% can be obtained using the proposed uniaxial fringe projection system.