Bright field illumination system

A bright field illumination system for inspecting an area, the system comprising:

• a camera having a lens facing the inspected area;
• a light source capable of emitting light;
• and
• a reflector for reflecting non-collimated emitted light towards the inspected area so that light incident on the inspected area is specularly reflected into the lens to produce uniform intensity bright field illumination across the inspected area.

An optical system for inspecting characteristically different kinds of variations in a surface, the system comprising:

• first and second optical subsystems for multiplexed illumination of a predetermined sequence of selected common portions of a material surface region under optical inspection sequenced in alternating succession;
• the first optical subsystem providing bright field illumination;
• the second optical subsystem providing fringe illumination taking into account phase information;
• an inspection subsystem for viewing common portions of material surface regions in connection with illumination by the first and second optical subsystems;
• and
• a data processing system for processing optical inspection data from both the first and the second optical subsystems;
• wherein
• the second optical subsystem comprises a module for performing ordered phase unwrapping, in which a raw phase map having many pixels is produced, and a quality metric is applied to each pixel in the raw phase map to rank pixels for an order in which the pixels will be unwrapped.