Four-step shear method for the absolute measurement of a flat surface based on phase measuring deflectometry.

This paper proposes a new shearing approach to eliminate the systematic errors in phase measuring deflectometry (PMD). Besides a normal measurement using PMD, another three measurements are taken when the test surfaces are translated and rotated with an amount of known magnitude in our proposed method. The four measurements give three sheared wavefronts, and then the difference Zernike polynomial fitting and a least squares algorithm are proposed to reconstruct the true test surface figure. The proposed method is demonstrated and verified through computer simulation and experimental results. The error propagation when the sheared wavefronts include random noise and the introduced errors due to the incorrect shearing values are both analyzed.