Single-Shot Optical Metrology: Principles, Methods, and Applications

Optical measurement techniques offer significant advantages: they operate contact-free, non-destructively, and highly parallelized, enabling short measurement times while maintaining high resolution. Single-shot methods take this a step further by capturing all necessary information for a measurement in a single acquisition. Unlike sequential or scanning approaches, they require no relative movement between the measurement system and the object and do not rely on varying illumination conditions, such as different projection patterns or source points. This results in extremely high measurement speeds, opening up new possibilities for analyzing dynamic or transient processes. This is particularly beneficial in harsh production environments that are often affected by vibration, turbulence, or temperature gradients, as well as for capturing rapid spatio-temporal changes in objects or states. This contribution gives an overview of the methodological approaches of various singleshot measurement techniques, discusses their respective advantages and limitations, and presents experimental implementations and results from our recent research at the Institute. Techniques discussed include hyperspectral and interferometric methods for topography and wavefront detection as well as computerized imaging techniques for relative distance measurement and lensless imaging.