A method for calculating the center position of collimated light

Abstract

It is a key problem to accurately calculate beam spots' center of measuring the warp by using a collimated laser. A new method, named double geometrical center method (DGCM), is put forward for the first time. In this method, a plane wave perpendicularly irradiates an aperture stop, and a charge couple device (CCD) is employed to receive the diffraction-beam spots, then the geometrical centers of the first and the second diffraction-beam spots are calculated respectively, and their mean value is regarded as the center of datum beam. In face of such adverse instances as laser intension distributing defectively, part of the image being saturated, this method can still work well. What's more, this method can detect whether an unacceptable error exits in the courses of image receiving, processing and calculating. The experimental results indicate the precision of this method is high.