3D Measurement and Characterization of Ultra-precision Aspheric Surfaces

Abstract

Aspheric surfaces have become widely used in various fields ranging from imaging systems to energy and biomedical applications. Although many research works have been conducted to address their manufacturing and measurement, there are still challenges in form characterization of aspheric surfaces considering a large number of data points. This paper presents a comparative study of 3D measurement and form characterization of an aspheric lens using tactile and optical single scanning probing systems. The design of the LNE high precision profilometer, traceable to standard references is presented. The measured surfaces are obtained from the aforementioned system. They are characterized with large number of data points for which a suitable process chain is deployed. The form characterization of the aspheric surfaces is based on surface fitting techniques by comparing the measured surface with the design surface. A comparative study of registration methods and non-linear Orthogonal Least-Squares fitting Methods is presented. Experimental results are analyzed and discussed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.