• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.13 no.11
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• pp.64-72
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• 1996

This paper is aimed to develop an optical method for measuring 3-dimensional shapes of specular objects having curved surfaces. The existing methods measuring the shapes of specular objects have several common disadvantages: they may not work properly if the surface is highly specular like mirror surface or if the reflectance property is not uniform over the surface. And, they often require the a priori knowledege about the surface reflectance. To overcome these disadvantages, the measurement using double pass retroreflection method is proposed in this paper. For this measurement principle, an experimental measuring system is designed and prepared which is composed of a galvanometer scanner, a beam splitter, a laser source, a CCD camera, and a reflector made of retroreflective material. To verify the effectiveness of the measurement system a series of experiments are performaed for various specular objects. The results observed from the experiments show that the developed optical sensing system can be an effective mean of measuring the 3-D shapes of specular objects.