Abstract

A great advantage of the white-light interferometry is that it can be used for profile measurement of objects with a rough surface. A speckle pattern that arises in the image plane allows one to observe the interference; however, this pattern is also the source of the measurement uncertainty. We derive the theoretical limits of the longitudinal uncertainty by virtue of the first-order statistics of the speckle pattern. It is shown that this uncertainty depends on the surface roughness of the measured object only; it does not depend on the setup parameters.

© 2003 Optical Society of America

White-light interferometry on rough surfaces--measurement uncertainty caused by surface roughness

Pavel Pavliček and Ondřej Hýbl
Appl. Opt. 47(16) 2941-2949 (2008)

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Correlated speckle noise in white-light interferometry: theoretical analysis of measurement uncertainty

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Measurement of the influence of dispersion on white-light interferometry

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