Quantitative Characterisation of Surface Texture

This paper reviews the different methods used to give a quantitative characterisation of surface texture. The paper contains a review of conventional 2D as well as 3D roughness parameters, with particular emphasis on recent international standards and developments. It presents new texture characterisation methods, such as fractals, wavelets, change trees and others, including for each method a short review, the parameters that the new methods calculate, and applications of the methods to solve surface problems. The paper contains a discussion on the relevance of the different parameters and quantification methods in terms of functional correlations, and it addresses the need for reducing the large number of existing parameters. The review considers the present situation and gives suggestions for future activities.