A brief review of the theories used to solve the problems of characterization of rough surfaces from optical measurements is made. A special attention is paid to the very important case of microrough surfaces, where the order of magnitude of the width of the irregularities is less than ten microns. We compare the limits of validity of the main theories : theory of speckle developed in Optics, approximate electromagnetic theories and rigorous electromagnetic theories. We show that, with the recent improvements of the rigorous theory, very interesting numerical results can be obtained, even though the numerical limitations cannot be neglected. For example, we use rigorous numerical results to show that two random microrough surfaces having the same correlation function, illuminated by the same incident beam, can generate diffraction patterns at infinity having very different statistical properties.

Date Published: 17 November 1986
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 0654, Automatic Optical Inspection, (17 November 1986); doi: 10.1117/12.938269

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0654:
Automatic Optical Inspection
Lionel R. Baker; H. John Caulfield, Editor(s)