Novel developments of refractive power measurement techniques in the automotive world

Abstract

Refractive power measurements serve as the primary quality standard in the automotive glazing industry. In the light of autonomous driving new optical metrics are becoming more and more popular for specifying optical quality requirements for the windshield. Nevertheless, the link between those quantities and the refractive power needs to be established in order to ensure a holistic requirement profile for the windshield. As a consequence, traceable high-resolution refractive power measurements are still required for the glass quality assessment. Standard measurement systems using Moiré patterns for refractive power monitoring in the automotive industry are highly resolution limited, wherefore they are insufficient for evaluating the camera window area. Consequently, there is a need for more sophisticated refractive power measurement systems that provide a higher spatial resolution. In addition, a calibration procedure has to be developed in order to guarantee for the comparability of the measurement results. For increasing the resolution, a measurement setup based on an auto-correlation algorithm is tested in this paper. In order to benchmark the proposed high-resolution refractive power measurement technique, a novel laser-based setup has been realized in the Volkswagen Laser Laboratory as a reference method tuned for high-accuracy measurements. Furthermore, a calibration procedure is established by using a single reference lens with a nominal refractive power of . For the calibration of the entire measurement range of the system, the lens is tilted by an inclination angle orthogonal to the optical axis. The effective refractive power is then given by the Kerkhof model. By adopting the measurement and calibration procedure presented in this paper, glass suppliers in the automotive industry will be able to detect relevant manufacturing defects within the camera window area more accurately paving the way for a holistic quality assurance of the windshield for future advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) functionalities. Concurrently, the traceability of the measurement results is ensured by establishing a calibration chain based on a single reference lens, which is traced back to international standards.