Empirical study on effect of surface texture and grain size on displacement measurement of optical flow sensors

Although, the optical flow sensors which are used in optical mouse have high resolution in measuring displacement, their error refrain us from a precise and reliable measurement. Besides, these sensors require calibration based on the surface. Their error has different sources and the most important is surface texture in micro level. In this research, we have worked to find surface conditions on which sensor measurement is more precise. For this aim, we used an 800 DPI low cost optical flow sensor. For making different surface textures and grains, we printed different textures with 600 and 1200DPI resolution on white paper with certain length. Then we used optical flow sensor for measuring displacement over these textures. Results show that, sensor does significantly better measurement over surface with more dissimilarity in grain shape and distribution and grain size bigger than the sensor resolution is suitable.