Optical methods for distance and displacement measurements

Abstract

This tutorial reviews various noncontact optical sensing techniques that can be used to measure distances to objects, and related parameters such as displacements, surface profiles, velocities and vibrations. The techniques that are discussed and compared include intensity-based sensing, triangulation, time-of-flight sensing, confocal sensing, Doppler sensing, and various kinds of interferometric sensing with both high- and low-coherence sources.