CCD_Rasnik straightness monitoring system

CCD_Rasnik: Principle of the coding of the mask.

(patent pending)
A mask is generated by stacking position coded basic building blocks. We will call such a block a B3. The horizontal and vertical codes give the position of the basic building block in the total mask.

The size of one spot (field in the chessboard) is in the order of 100 microns, which covers roughly 10 times 10 CCD camera pixels.
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Example of a coded mask.


Glass mask

The actual mask is a metal on glass mask, as used for integrated circuit production (or a contact copy of such a mask). The anti-reflective coated side should be pointing to the projecting lens.

These masks are produced by commercial firms, taking Gerber files as input. Postscript files, plotted on high resolution machines, turned out to be disappointing. Since postscript interpreters work with floats, rather then integers, it is very hard to define the data in such way that rounding off is done in the proper way.

Also tests were performed with gray code locations instead of inverting them. In practice gray has to be defined as fine lines of black and white and the results are unpredictable.

Actual cameraview

You can have a look at an actual cameraview as grabbed with a demokit (17 kbyte jpg).
How to decode the pattern again (password needed).

go to CCD_Rasnik home page.
You can mail suggestions for this page to: Henk Groenstege.
july 1996