I initially wrote a script in MATLAB that takes pictures of the laser beam's profile and fits them to a two dimensional gaussian in order to determine the position and width of the beam. This code is now (mostly) ported to C so that it can be imbedded in the camera software package that Joe is writing. The fitting works fairly well for pictures with the beam directly incident on the camera, and less well for pictures of scatter off the end mirrors of the arms, since scatter from defects in the mirror have intensities much greater than the intensity of the beam's gaussian profile.
The next steps are to finish up porting the fitting code to C, and then modify it so it can better handle the images off the end mirror. Some thoughts on how to do this are to use a fourier transform and a low pass filter, or to simply use a center-of-mass calculation (with the defect peaks reduced in intensity), since position is more important than beam width in this calculation. The eventual goal is to include the edge of the optic in the picture and use the fit of the beam position in comparison to the optic's position to find the beam's location on the mirror. |