In this work, we proposed for stitching interferometry to use a triple-beam interferometer to measure both the distance and the tilt for all sub-apertures before the stitching process. The relative piston between two neighboring sub-apertures is then calculated by using the data in the overlapping area. Comparisons are made between our method, and the classical least-squares principle stitching method. Our method can improve the accuracy and repeatability of the classical stitching method when a large number of sub-aperture topographies are taken into account. Our simulations and experiments on flat and spherical mirrors indicate that our proposed method can decrease the influence of the interferometer error from the stitched result. The comparison of stitching system with Fizeau interferometry data is about 2 nm root mean squares and the repeatability is within +/- 2.5 nm peak to valley. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America
