Abstract
Confocal laser microscopy (CLM) is the imaging modality widely used for 3D shape measurement in the field of industrial inspection. Recently, further reduction of image acquisition time is strongly required for rapid inspection. The conventional CLM has acquired the 2D image by mechanical scanning of the focused beam spot. However, if the confocal 2D image can be obtained without the need for the mechanical scanning, the image acquisition time will be largely reduced. In this paper, we developed the full-field CLM without the need for mechanical scanning of the focused beam spot. By combination of wavelength/1D-space conversion with line-imaging configuration, the broadband light is focused onto a sample as 2D illumination with an objective lens, in which vertical and horizontal coordinate are related with the line image and the spectral wavelength, respectively. After superimposing the 2D image of the sample onto 2D illumination, the spectral line image of the reflected beam was measured by a multichannel spectrometer equipped with 2D CCD camera. The resulting spectral line image directly reflects the confocal 2D image of sample.
