High-resolution three-dimensional surface imaging microscope based on digital fringe projection technique

The three-dimensional (3-D) micro-scale surface imaging system based on the digital fringe projection technique for the assessments of microfiber and metric screw is presented in this paper. The proposed system comprises a digital light processing (DLP) projector, a set of optical lenses, a microscope, and a charge coupled device (CCD). The digital seven-step fringe patterns from the DLP projector pass through a set of optical lenses before being focused on the target surface. A set of optical lenses is designed for adjustment and size coupling of fringe patterns. A high-resolution CCD camera is employed to picture these distorted fringe patterns. The wrapped phase map is calculated by seven-step phase-shifting calculation from these distorted fringe patterns. The unwrapping calculation with quality guided path is introduced to compute the absolute phase values. The dimensional calibration methods are used to acquire the transformation between real 3-D shape and the absolute phase value. The capability of complex surface measurement for our system is demonstrated by using ISO standard screw M1.6. The experimental results for microfiber with 3 μm diameter indicate that the spatial and vertical resolutions can reach about 3 μm in our system. The proposed system provides a fast digital imaging system to examine the surface features with high-resolution for automatic optical inspection industry.