Error analysis and correction for color in laser triangulation measurement

With the aim to improve the accuracy of laser triangulation measurements, this paper proposes to analyze the error caused by different colors of a measurand surface and proposes a compensation method. By investigating the fundamentals of laser triangulation, the color error is obtained via the Phong model, while the relationship between the measurement error and color is obtained through experiments. Based on the above results, a color error compensation method is proposed, which produces a color-error library according to the error of the different colors. Thus, the correlation between the error and color of the measurand surface is also calculated. The experimental data demonstrates that this method can reduce the error to 10% and maintain the color measurement error to within 90 μm. Moreover, this technique is of great significance to measure a measurand surface with different colors.