Study on an automatic processing technique of the circle interference fringe for fine interferometry

The fringe center method (FCM) is an important digital processing technique of fringe patterns analysis for interferometry. In this paper, an improved automatic processing technique based on FCM was presented, which correlated the processing link and the looped feature of the circle fringe pattern. It also integrated several techniques including noise removal, the fringe thinning, the fringe patching, assignment of the fringe orders and wavefront reconstruction and can be executed orderly and automatically. Based on the new the algorithms of the fringe patching and assignment of the fringe orders, the fringe feature information was extracted automatically and the interference wavefront was reconstructed by Zernike polynomial fitting method. With the automatic processing technique, the circle interference fringe of the fine polished aluminum disks surface captured by the Twyman-Green interferometer was processed, and the surface profile and the parameters of the disk were obtained automatically. The experiments show that the improved automatic processing technique was more accurate and fast in measurement than the conventional one. It was convenient to use it in in-situ industry inspection.