Application of ordinary kriging for interpolation of micro-structured technical surfaces

Kriging is an interpolation technique used in geostatistics. In this paper we present kriging applied in the field of three-dimensional optical surface metrology. Technical surfaces are not always optically cooperative, meaning that measurements of technical surfaces contain invalid data points because of different effects. These data points need to be interpolated to obtain a complete area in order to fulfil further processing. We present an elementary type of kriging, known as ordinary kriging, and apply it to interpolate measurements of different technical surfaces containing different kinds of realistic defects. The result of the interpolation with kriging is compared to six common interpolation techniques: nearest neighbour, natural neighbour, inverse distance to a power, triangulation with linear interpolation, modified Shepard's method and radial basis function. In order to quantify the results of different interpolations, the topographies are compared to defect-free reference topographies. Kriging is derived from a stochastic model that suggests providing an unbiased, linear estimation with a minimized error variance. The estimation with kriging is based on a preceding statistical analysis of the spatial structure of the surface. This comprises the choice and adaptation of specific models of spatial continuity. In contrast to common methods, kriging furthermore considers specific anisotropy in the data and adopts the interpolation accordingly. The gained benefit requires some additional effort in preparation and makes the overall estimation more time-consuming than common methods. However, the adaptation to the data makes this method very flexible and accurate.

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