Front and back surface measurement of the transparent planar element based on multi-frequency fringe deflectometry.

As a highly accurate metrology, phase measuring deflectometry (PMD) can be used for in-situ surface shape measurement. However, due to the reflection off the back surface, PMD cannot measure both the front and back surfaces of the transparent planar element simultaneously. Therefore, this paper proposes a method for measuring the front and back surfaces of the transparent planar element. The phase distribution corresponding to the front and back surfaces can be firstly acquired by multi-frequency fringe deflectometry. Then, the front and back surface shapes can be obtained by inverse ray-tracing and nonlinear optimization. Numerical simulation and experiment verify the proposed method. The surface shape of window glass with a thickness of 10 mm is measured in the experiment. The surface shape error is around 50 nm in the root mean square with a diameter of 51 mm.