Absolute Measurement of Aspheric Surfaces Using White-Light Interferometry

White-light interferometric technique has been widely applied in the measurement of three-dimensional profiles and roughness with high-precision. Based on the characteristic of interferometric technique, a new method combined with image location and a three-dimensional stage is proposed to achieve the non-contact absolute shape measurement for aspheric and spherical surface in a slarge range. The interference fringes vary with the horizontal displacement of the measured surface, the surface information was obtained by locating the transformation of the maximal intensity in the interferograms. Two main influence factors are discussed; they are performance of the inerferimetric microscope and the stage. Since the performance of the stage directly determines the measurement precision, a three-dimensional displacement stage with a large range and a high precision was developed. Some experiments were carried out to verify the performance of the three-dimensional displacement stage and the validity of the new measurement method with satisfactory results.