A new free-form surface fitting method for precision coordinate metrology

Free-form surfaces are widely used in advanced optical and mechanical devices. In order to assess the form accuracy of free-form surfaces, it is needed to fit the measurement surface with the design template. To improve the fitting efficiency and accuracy, the fitting procedure is divided into two stages, rough fitting and final fitting. A new rough fitting method, called structured region signature is proposed. Structured region signature is a generalised global feature which represents the surface shape by a one-dimensional function. The template location occupying the best fitting signature is considered to be the correct initial position of the measurement surface. In the final fitting, the motion parameters are calculated iteratively using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. Simulation and experiments are given to identify the validity of this method. It is demonstrated that the fitting accuracy is as high as 1:106.