Surface roughness measurement with laser triangulation

A surface roughness measurement method is introduced in the paper, which is based on laser triangulation and digital image processing technique. In the measuring system, we use the line-structured light as light source, microscope lens and high-accuracy CCD sensor as displacement sensor as well. In addition, the working angle corresponding to the optimal sensitivity is considered in the optical structure design to improve the measuring accuracy. Through necessary image processing operation for the light strip image, such as center-line extraction with the barycenter algorithm, Gaussian filtering, the value of roughness is calculated. A standard planing surface is measured experimentally with the proposed method and the stylus method (Mitutoyo SJ-410) respectively. The profilograms of surface appearance are greatly similar in the shape and the amplitude to two methods. Also, the roughness statistics values are close. The results indicate that the laser triangulation with the line-structured light can be applied to measure the surface roughness with the advantages of rapid measurement and visualized display of surface roughness profile.