High-precision measurement of low reflectivity specular object based on phase measuring deflectometry

Phase measuring deflectometry(PMD)is a robust,noncoherent technique for the characterization of specular surface.For measuring high specular reflectivity surface,PMD can deliver micron radian range local gradient.However,when the measured surface has low specular reflectivity,the accuracy of the measured gradient is low since the captured fringe pattern shows low signal to noise ratio.The phase error characteristics in PMD system when testing low reflectivity surfaces are analyzed.The analysis illustrates that the random phase error increases rapidly while the nonlinear error drops slowly with the decreasing of the tested surface reflectivity.In order to attain high precision measurement of low reflectivity specular surface,a robust error reduction method based on wavelet de-noising is proposed to reduce the phase error.This error reduction method is compared with several other normally used methods in both simulation and experiment work.The method based on the wavelet de-noising shows better performance when measuring the low reflectivity specular surface.