Real-time uncertainty reduction in laser triangulation via dynamic speckle correlation

Abstract

The speckle-induced measurement uncertainty is one of the major bottlenecks to achieve high measurement accuracy in laser triangulation sensors (LTS). Conventional methods for improving uncertainty focus on suppressing speckles and refining centroid extraction algorithms, overlooking the potential information about object motion that speckles inherently contain. To address this deficiency, a dynamic speckle correlation (DSC) method is proposed to reduce speckle-induced measurement uncertainty in laser triangulation systems. This method uses the correlation between speckle patterns and the movement of the object being measured, thereby enabling real-time error compensation without any speckle reduction mechanisms. To verify the effectiveness of the DSC method, we have designed a compact LTS based on oblique incident laser. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, for displacement measurement of objects with surface roughness ranging from Ra0.4 to Ra3.2, the DSC method can effectively reduce the root mean square (RMS) measurement error to 3∼5μm. Compared with using the traditional grayscale centroid method alone, the measurement accuracy after DSC compensation is improved by at least 20%.