Two-dimensional spectral signal model for chromatic confocal microscopy.

In chromatic confocal microscopy, the signal characteristics influence the accuracy of the signal processing, which in turn determines measurement performance. Thus, a full understanding of the spectral characteristics is critical to enhance the measurement performance. Existing spectral models only describe the signal intensity-wavelength characteristics, without taking the displacement-wavelength relation into consideration. These models require prior knowledge of the optical design, which reduces the effectiveness in the optical design process. In this paper, we develop a two-dimensional spectral signal model to describe the signal intensity-wavelength-displacement characteristics in chromatic confocal microscopy without prior knowledge of the optical design layout. With this model, the influence of the dimensional characteristics of the confocal setup and the displacement-wavelength characteristics and monochromatic aberrations of the hyperchromatic objective are investigated. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of our signal model. Using our model, further evaluation of the spectral signal can be used to enhance the measurement performance of chromatic confocal microscopy.