Characterization of engineered surfaces – R. Verma and J. Raja

Abstract

In the recent years there has been an increasing interest in designing surfaces to meet a particular functional requirement. Examples include surfaces generated using microreplication and micro-structure technology. The surface analysis techniques currently available only deals with the two-dimensional characterization of the three-dimensional surfaces. There is a growing need to develop an intelligent surface analysis and inspection system that deals with the dimensional aspect of the three-dimensional features. This paper describes the methodology for numerical characterization of surfaces that have repeated or non-repeated features at different scales using image processing techniques. This includes development of an intelligent surface-scanning algorithm and methods for three-dimensional surfaces to identify shape geometries and for stable extraction of significant surface features. Geometric fitting algorithms have been used to calculate the dimensions of the feature.