The imaging system of a head-up display of production-vehicles in automobile industry includes the windshield which is different for each automobile type. Thus, the the imaging system has to be matched to it. This requires an effcient optic design procedure in order to minimize the development costs. One challenge is the layout of the freeform surfaces of the imaging reflectors because there is a lack of procedures comparable to classical imaging systems like first order design or aberration theory. Additionally, reference systems are not published. Onother big issue is consistent data management. It is usual practice in automotive industriy that the surface data of the imaging surfaces will be imported in CAD systems. Often, from these systems manufacturing code is automaticall generated. Importing surface date is delicate, because the surface describtion in CAD systems is done by NURBS (non-uniform rational B-Splines) which are not or insufficently implemented in commercial optic design software. Thus, a conversion of the surface is performed by the software tools. This conversion is normally not much documented and problems with e.g. accuracy, surface continuity often arrise.In this contribution some methods for the design of an imaging reflector for a head-up display and some resulting designs are presented. Additionally it is shown that already in the design phase the freeform surface can be described by NURBS without any lack of performance. This kind of describtion can then easily be transfered to CAD systems by standardized formats like IGES or STEP without any error-prone conversion.

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Classical triangulation sensors exhibit a orientation depend signal if the scattering properties of the work-piece are not symmetrical like at curved surface locations. This problem is avoided by rotational symmetric triangulation sensors. Due to this attractive property in a lot of applications such a sensor was introduced very recently on the market. This sensor is based on refractive optics and a special PSD detector, both custom made resulting in high costs. Additionally, the existing optical design approach does not offer an optical layout to start with, thus a good amount of trial and error is required and non-optimal solutions are probable. Therefore, there is great interest for a clear optical design strategy that results in layouts that are suitable also to use low cost commercial available detectors, such as CCD or CMOS image detectors. In this paper such a design procedure is presented for optical designs that use reflecting optical surfaces. Several solutions are depicted and discussed. The designs are not only attractive from the optical point of view and from detector considerations, but also from opto-mechanical design issues. For example designs with only one opto-mechanical part are possible. The resulting optical designs consist of aspherical surfaces which are obtained directly by using only some new relations of first order optics for off-axis objects. The designs are validated by exact ray tracing. These ray tracing results show already very good performance. Nevertheless, it was possible to further optimize the optical designs very efficiently using ray tracing software, thus yielding improved optical properties.

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The influence of photon noise to the signal evaluation of digital microscopy using a sinusoidal fringe pattern illumination with incoherent light is shown. The signal is evaluated by calculating the contrast for every charge coupled device (CCD) pixel when the object is defocused and the fringe pattern illumination shifted by a defined phase over the sample for every z-position. Every CCD pixel gets a certain number of irradiance values for every z-position which allows calculating the contrast. The result is the focal depth response (FDR) for every pixel. The FDR is Gaussian shaped and contains the height information of the specimen in the maximum. To accelerate the signal evaluation it is common to compute a fit curve to detect the maximum of the FDR. Due to the statistical photon noise, every measured irradiance value and every computed contrast value contains an error and thus also the maximum of the three-pointGauss-curve-fit. The error of the maximum of the three-point-Gausscurve-fit is the uncertainty of the measured height information. A general and a simplified analytical closed form solution are derived to calculate this uncertainty. An easily manageable equation allows calculating the optimal spatial frequency for an incoherent sinusoidal fringe pattern illumination and the corresponding sampling distance. © 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).