Metrological characteristics for the calibration of surface topography measuring instruments: a review

Abstract

The multinational Arabidopsis research community is highly collaborative. This has been demonstrated through global efforts to publish the Arabidopsis genome sequence in 2000; the long-term support for the three international stock centres in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan; and in the development of community-facing informatics resources such as The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), the Bio-Analytic Resource for Plant Biology (BAR), the Munich Information Centre for Protein Sequences (MIPS), the International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium (IAIC), and Araport. The Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC) has represented this global community through its joint oversight of the annual International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR); production of a MASC annual report 1 ; and preparation of a series of decadal roadmaps that have helped coordinate the future

Optical topography measurement of steeply-sloped surfaces beyond the specular numerical aperture limit

“…However, various instruments are capable of imaging and obtaining topography information from surfaces with slope angles well outside the specular acceptance cone, without repositioning the sample or instrument. This capability is attributed to the capture and detection of diffuse and back-scattered light from the microstructures found on the surface slopes [14][15][16][17] , which is possible due to recent advances in instrument technology and design. For a coherence scanning interferometry (CSI) instrument, high dynamic range measurement of parts with wide reflectance ranges can be performed through the alternation of light levels during a measurement or between sequential measurements, and dynamic noise reduction for detection of weak signals can be achieved through signal oversampling [17][18][19] .…”

Does interferometry work? A critical look at the foundations of interferometric surface topography measurement

“…Nonetheless, there are frequent occasions when interferometers do not work as expected. This is increasingly the case as traditional metrology techniques are applied to non-traditional test objects, from additive manufacturing parts to aspherical or freeform lenses with highly sloped surfaces [10][11][12][13]. The desire to extend the technique to these challenging new measurement tasks motivates a critical re-examination of the foundational principles of the technique.…”

High-accuracy surface measurement through modelling of the surface transfer function in interference microscopy

“…Optical measuring systems [6] outperform traditional mechanical methods in that they reduce surface damage, have higher resolutions (except for the case of atomic force microscope), can allow improved accessibility, and operate at high speed, therefore, allowing dense 3D point cloud capture in production processes. However, the complex surfaces significantly challenge the use of optical measuring techniques [7]. The current calibration framework and methods for optical surface measuring instruments need to be improved to respond to the increasing geometrical complexity of functional surfaces.…”

“…Interference microscopy is one of the most accurate techniques to offer non-contact, high-speed and high-resolution measurement of three-dimensional (3D) surface topography [6][7][8][9]. The major modalities of interference microscopy include coherence scanning interferometer (CSI) and phase-shifting interferometry (PSI) [6,8].…”

“…For such surfaces, measurement errors can be much larger than the noise level of the instrument [11][12][13]. Current calibration methods [14] do not identify slope-dependent errors in CSI as the understanding of the optical instrument response to surfaces with complex geometries is insufficient [7]. A promising method to quantify the instrument response of a CSI is through the evaluation of its three-dimensional surface transfer function (3D STF, referred to in [10,15 -17] as the 3D transfer function).…”