Curvature measurement using phase shifting in-line interferometry, single shot off-axis geometry and Zernike's polynomial fitting

This paper describes the difference between phase shifting in-line interferometry, single shot off-axis geometry and Zernike's polynomial fitting methods for measuring the curvature of a spherical smooth surface by using the Michelson interferometer. In phase shifting in-line interferometry, four interferograms shifted by a piezoelectric actuator (PZT) were captured by a digital detector and corrected by using the flat fielding method. In off-axis geometry, single shot off-axis interferogram was obtained by tilting the reference and the object wave of the off-axis interferogram was reconstructed in the central region of the observation plane by using the digital reference wave concept. The demodulated phase map was obtained and unwrapped to remove the 2π ambiguity. The unwrapped phase map was converted to height and the sagittal length that used for curvature measurement was calculated accurately. The results extracted from phase shifting in-line interferometry and single shot off-axis geometry methods were compared with the results extracted from single shot Zernike's polynomial fitting method and the results were in excellent agreement. A new trial was done to overcome the fringes produced from the object interfaces. Some factors of uncertainty which affected on the measurement were estimated in the order of 6.0 × 10−5 mm or 0.003 dioptre (▽).