3-D Measurement of Solder Paste Using Two-Step Phase Shift Profilometry

A two-step phase shift profilometry method (2-step PSP) with prefiltering and postfiltering stages is proposed to reconstruct the 3-D profile of solder paste. Two sinusoidal patterns which are pi-out-of-phase are used in the 3-D reconstruction. The new method uses only two fringe patterns rather than four as the four-step phase shift profilometry (4-step PSP). In Fourier transform profilometry (FTP), a bandpass filter is required to extract the fundamental spectrum from the background and higher order harmonics due to camera noise and imperfectness of the pattern projector. By using two pi-out-of-phase sinusoidal fringe patterns, the background term can be eliminated directly by taking the average of the two fringe patterns. The fringe pattern which is close to its ideal form can also be recovered from the averaging process. Prefiltering is utilized in filtering raw images to remove noise causing higher order harmonics. Hilbert transform is then used to obtain the in-quadrature component of the processed fringe pattern. Postfiltering is applied for reconstructing an appropriate 3-D profile.