Measurement of surface form deviation of the plane optical element using grid line method

A method for automatically measuring the surface form deviation of the plane optical element is presented. It uses the image pre-processing technique to obtain the centerlines of the interference fringes, the grid line technique to search the average fringe spacing and the maximum curvature of the interference fringes, and the normalization to obtain the value of surface form deviation of the optical element. The experimental results show that the measuring precision of the surface form deviation of the plane optical element reaches the value of 0.1 and the method improves the adaptation capability of processing the interference fringes, which indicates that the method can substitute the visual interpretation of interference fringes in high-noise workshop environment.