Measurement of diameter of metal cylinders using a sinusoidally vibrating interference pattern

A method for measuring external diameters of metal cylinders is proposed in which a sinusoidally vibrating interference pattern (SVIP) of 100-μm period is used as an exact scale. Lights from the end-points of a metal cylinder are extracted with a spatial filtering in an imaging system to form a cross-sectional image of the metal cylinder. On the image a sinusoidally phase-modulated signal owing to the SVIP is detected with a CCD image sensor to measure the phases of the SVIP at the two end-points of the cylinder. The coordinates of the two end-points are obtained from the phases at the two end-points, the phase distribution of the SVIP, and the coordinates of the pixels of the CCD image sensor. Metal cylinder diameters of 7.99, 8.00, and 9.00 mm are measured along their length directions with an error less than 1 μm.