Abstract
Inspection and shape measurement of three-dimensional objects are widely needed in industries for quality monitoring and control. Recently the shape measurement using interferometric principle is found to be a successful methodology among other visual or optical technologies. Especially, the measuring method using wavelength scanning interferometer(WSI) has a great advantage in comparison with other conventional jnterferometric methods in that the absolute distance from the reference surface can be directly obtained from the amount of jnterferometric phase change. However, the measurement methods using WSI proposed by other researchers have low measurement resolution so far because they can't measure fractional phase change. To avoid this shortcoming we propose a new algorithm in this paper, which can obtain a small amount of even fractional phase change by sinusoidal function fitting. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed sinusoidal function fitting algorithm, a series of measuring experiments are conducted for discontinuously shaped specimens which have various height. The proposed algorithm shows much more enhanced measurement resolution than other existing conventional algorithms such as zero crossing algorithm and Fourier transform algorithm.