The Development of a New Image Acquisition & Analysis System for 3D Surface Measurements Using Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy

Quantitative surface measurement is an important field in many applications including materials science and engineering quality control. A non-destructive and versatile technique for quantifying surface roughness in 3D is Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy (CLSM). However, this technique has not been widely accepted to use for quantitative surface measurements due to limited work on it. The project has researched the suitability of using the system for surface characterization and appropriate settings for image acquisition for quantitative surface analysis. Based on the above fundamental work, this study has developed and presented a comprehensive approach of using the system for quantitative surface characterization through image processing, 3D image construction, image stitching and numerical image analysis. The surface characterization results presented in the paper have demonstrated that the system can be used to accurately measure surface roughness of engineering surfaces.