Scan-Less Line Field Optical Coherence Tomography, with Automatic Image Segmentation, as a Measurement Tool for Automotive Coatings

Abstract

The measurement of the thicknesses of layers is important for the quality assurance of industrial coating systems. Current measurement techniques only provide a limited amount of information. Here, we show that spectral domain Line Field (LF) Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is able to return to the user a cross sectional B-Scan image in a single shot with no mechanical moving parts. To reliably extract layer thicknesses from such images of automotive paint systems, we present an automatic graph search image segmentation algorithm. To show that the algorithm works independently of the OCT device, the measurements are repeated with a separate time domain Full Field (FF) OCT system. This gives matching mean thickness values within the standard deviations of the measured thicknesses across each B-Scan image. The combination of an LF-OCT with graph search segmentation is potentially a powerful technique for the quality assurance of non-opaque industrial coating layers.

Keywords

• optical coherence tomography
• coatings
• spectral domain
• time domain
• quality assurance
• line field
• image segmentation
• graph search