Topography characterization of grinding wheels plays anis important critical role in enhancing the

precision of the grinding process’s precision (Katsushi Furutani, 2002). Wheel topography is
mainly determined by to the following factors: (1) the wheel-making process; (2) the wheel
preparation procedure; (3) wheel composition; and (4) random features (Noriyuki Ohguro etcet al.,
1995). Assessing a wheel's topography is useful to determine the wheel-cutting ability. The
topography assessment of a wheel is an useful tool to develop the understanding of wheel cutting
ability. However, extracting it is difficult to extract the surface topography from grinding tools is
difficult because due to their surfaces are rough, random, multi-scale , and multi-material surfaces.
Techniques for wWheels measuring techniques can be classified as into online and offline
methods. An online method monitors the changing of wheel topography during the manufacturing
process; , tThus, it provides valuable information for enhancing the its precision of this process.
Although, online methods have limited measurement capabilities The measurement ability of
online methods, however, is only very limiting (L. Blunt et al., 2006). So Therefore, the offline
methods, i.e., measuring a wheel while it is not working (e.g., measuring them by with a
contact/non-contact instrument in a laboratory), are used to developing the understandings of
wheel performances due tobecause of their higher measurement precision. There is only a focus
on offline methods in this paper. This paper is focused on the offline methods only.

Profilers and Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs) are typical stylus-basinged instruments to
measure a workpiece’s the size and surface topography of a workpiece. When using them to
measure grinding wheels directly, their stylusi are is easily worne , and the size of stylus size will
distorts the measured topography (R. Cai, 2004).

To avoid the problem, some researchers have implemented the non-contact technique, e.g. White
Light Interferometry (WLI), Optical profilometer, Scanning Laser Microscope (SLM), laser
microscope, laser triangulation system, binocular vision system. Additional algorithms are
required to extract the useful information of grains from the measured data given by the methods
above because such methods do not extract the abrasives from the wheel, which are of important
in the wheel’s performance. To this end, a specific data processing technique is usually developed
to obtain local details from the images captured by common instruments. For example a series of
operations, such as noise removing, data smoothing, matching and extracting, etc. in a laser
scanning system have been adopted.

In this study, a vertical scanning WLI-based system is established using a Mirau-type microscope
with X20 magnification and a PZT actuator to sample a 120# diamond resinoid bonded grinding
wheel. Emphasis is on extracting the grains while reconstructing the surface topography. Different
from other methods in this investigation the grains are extracted by using specific features that the
original measured data possesses.