The Development of a New Image Acquisition & Analysis System for 3D Surface Measurements Using Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy

Quantitative Surface Characterisation Using Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy

“…Based on the LSCM resolution tests and assessment rules in the 4288 ISO standard for quantitative surface characterisation, it has been concluded that the confocal system can be used to measure surface roughness over a range of 0.05 microns to a few microns (Peng & Tomovich, 2008). The above studies on the Radiance2000 confocal microscope system performance and hardware settings have provided a guide to selecting the appropriate objective lens and system setting for quantitative surface characterisation.…”

“…In addition, the minimal specimen preparation for LSCM imaging sets the technique to be a fast and versatile instrument for quantitative surface measurements (King and Delaney, 1994;Gjonnes, 1996;Bernabeu et al, 2001;Sheppard and Shotton, 1997;Haridoss et al, 1990). Past research using traditional 2D parameters for quantitative surface analysis found good correlation between roughness measurements of metal surfaces determined by LSCM, stylus and AFM surface measurement techniques (Gjonnes, 1996;Hanlon et al, 2001;Peng and Tomovich, 2008). Early research and development of surface measurement using LSCM found the technique to be viable for extracting surface information from 3D images in the form of numerical parameters, calculated from images generated using height encoded image (HEI) processing techniques Kirk, 1998 &1999).…”

“…For the tested objective lens, images of a front coated aluminium optical flat (Edmunds Optics 43402) were captured over several increments of scan rate, laser power, PMT gain, Kalman frame averaging and confocal aperture setting using zoom 999. Height encoding (Sheppard and Matthews, 1987;Pawley, 1995;Peng and Tomovich, 2008) the raw LSCM 3D images created HEI containing minimum and maximum z positions used to determine HEI depth. Plotted against increasing parameter settings, HEI depth highlighted the variance in depth discrimination (axial resolution) with various LSCM settings.…”