Patent ID: 7400414

Claim:
A hand-size dimensional metrology imaging device, the device comprising: an imaging portion having a field of view; an illumination stripe generating portion that projects an illumination stripe along an illumination stripe plane to the field of view; a display portion; a reference object having a reference object feature positioned in the field of view and extending along a y-axis direction that is nominally perpendicular to the illumination stripe plane, the reference object feature having a dimension along a direction parallel to the illumination stripe plane that varies according to a known relationship with a changing position along the y-axis direction; a signal processing and control portion comprising a scan acquisition portion and a surface map determining portion; wherein; the illumination stripe generating portion is arranged to illuminate a stripe on a workpiece surface in the field of view and on the reference object feature, when a scan of the workpiece is performed; the imaging portion is configured to provide contour image data to the signal processing and control portion for a plurality of contour images during the scan, corresponding to a plurality of scan positions along the y-axis direction relative the workpiece, each contour image including a workpiece portion comprising an image of the illumination stripe on the workpiece surface and a reference object portion comprising an image of the illumination stripe on the reference object feature; the signal processing and control portion is configured to input the contour image data and determine a surface map for a scanned portion of the workpiece surface, wherein the surface map comprises three-dimensional workpiece surface coordinate information corresponding to the scanned portion of the workpiece surface; and the signal processing and control portion is configured to determine respective x- and z-axis workpiece surface coordinate information based on the workpiece portion of a respective contour image, and to determine the y-axis workpiece surface coordinate information associated with that contour image by analyzing the reference object portion of the contour image, wherein the z-axis is nominally parallel to the illumination stripe plane and a plane that is nominally parallel to the y-axis direction and an optical axis of the imaging portion, and the x-axis is nominally parallel to the illumination stripe plane and orthogonal to the z-axis.