Roughness measurement of metals using a modified binary speckle image and adaptive optics

This paper proposes an integrated roughness measurement system that is based on adaptive optics (AO) and binary analysis of speckle pattern images. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the necessity for AO compensation in regions containing both heat and fluid flow turbulences. A speckle image was obtained by projecting a laser beam onto the specimen surface, and the laser pattern image reflected from the surface was binarized to experimentally correlate the intensity with the surface roughness. In the absence of the AO correction scheme, induced turbulences can severely increase the residual rms error from 0.14 to 1.4 μm. After a real-time closed-loop AO correction, we can reduce the wavefront root mean square (rms) error to 0.12 μm, which not only compensates for the aberration error from induced disturbances but also improves the overall performance of the optical system. In addition, an AO system having different gains was investigated, and a threshold gain value was found to be able to steadily compensate for the wavefront errors in less than 2 s. Measurement results of five steel samples having roughness ranging from 0.2 to 3.125 μm (0.3λ and 5λ, where λ is the diode laser wavelength) demonstrate an excellent correlation between the intensity distribution of binary images and average roughness with a correlation coefficient of 0.9982. Furthermore, the proposed AO-assisted system is in good agreement with the stylus method and less than 9.73% error values can be consistently obtained.