Characterization of textural surfaces using wave atoms

Abstract

Surface texture is one of the most important factors affecting the functional performance of components in many disciplines including metrology, tribology, fluid mechanics, optics, and manufacturing. Applications of wavelets and curvelets on functional surfaces have become an increasing interest. Unfortunately, they are not optimal to analyze the textural surfaces because they ignore the geometric properties of textures. In this letter, a wave atom transform combined with total variation minimization is proposed to characterize surfaces with oriented textural scratches. In comparison to curvelets, wave atoms not only capture the coherence of the pattern along the oscillations but also the pattern across the oscillations. The ability of the developed geometric multiscale method is demonstrated on engineering surfaces. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.