The most common optical measurement technologies used today for the three dimensional measurement of technical surfaces are Coherence Scanning Interferometry (CSI), Imaging Confocal Microscopy (IC), and Focus Variation (FV). Each one has its benefits and its drawbacks. FV will be the ideal technology for the measurement of those regions where the slopes are high and where the surface is very rough, while CSI and IC will provide better results for smoother and flatter surface regions. In this work we investigated the benefits and drawbacks of combining Interferometry, Confocal and focus variation to get better measurement of technical surfaces. We investigated a way of using Microdisplay Scanning type of Confocal Microscope to acquire on a simultaneous scan confocal and focus Variation information to reconstruct a three dimensional measurement. Several methods are presented to fuse the optical sectioning properties of both techniques as well as the topographical information. This work shows the benefit of this combination technique on several industrial samples where neither confocal nor focus variation is able to provide optimal results.

Reflectance-mode confocal microscopy is a novel imaging tool that enables the noninvasive exploration of the skin. It is based on the in vivo generation of x-y confocal images that represent high-resolution maps of the skin at different depths. This chapter describes the reflectance confocal microscopic features of main dermatological diseases including epidermal tumors, melanocytic tumors, parasitic and infectious skin diseases, and diseases of mucosa and nail.

The aim of this work is to propose a positiveness constraint on the Wigner Distribution Function (WDF) of the detected image of two incoherent point sources: if WDF lacks of zeroes along the frequency coordinate the object can not be resolved by imaging and detected systems; otherwise, it can. This criterion can be applied without preference for a circular clear diffraction limited aperture and for complex apertures with small aberration values; furthermore, it holds if the intensity of each source is different or even when the sources are not points.

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