The beam profiler is essentially a camera, software and pc that make the first two work together. There are many beam profilers you can buy e.g. from Newport, Thorlabs, Ophir and others. These tools have the advantage of being calibrated, equipped with appropriate filters and the software that distributed with them is simple and ready to use. And … these commercial beam profilers are extremely expensive when someone knows what is inside. For instance, few years ago a big company was selling a beam profiler for approx. 5000$. The camera they used had the look of a camera one could by for approx. 800$. I cannot prove it was the same unit, but it looked exactly the same way. So, the rest was probably the cost of the software and few filters.

The fact is that if you have a little bit of programming skills, then you can easily develop your own beam profiling software. I did it in LabView and in Delphi . The advantage is you know what you are doing, you know what fitting algorithms are used, what functions are used etc. And naturally, once you developed the software you can easily connect to any camera, if you know how to connect to this device. And you can easily connect to multiple different cameras from different vendors.

In LabView the task of developing a beam profiling software is extremely simple once you have access to the array of bytes representing each camera frame. You just need to reshape this 1-dimensional byte array into a 2-dimensional image array and send to the Intensity Graph control. Then configure properly the graph Z-scale et voila! The Intensity Graph let you also to define cursors which will be very useful in case you want to look at selected beam profiles in e.g. two orthogonal directions. From the graph Property Node take the cursors positions and take from the image 2D array the indicated row and column. With these two you can do whatever you want. For instance fit a Gaussian curve – the most typical step.

In case you have access to NI Vision module in LabView you can take advantage of its Image Display control which comes with many selection tools. Ni Vision have also many functions that e.g. allows you to find laser spots in the camera image. If for example you want to monitor the laser spot position you need to find its center. Mostly it is the so called center of gravity, CoG, that is determined. Determining CoG requires selection of the area of the image that will be analyzed. If you are looking at a single spot without heterogeneous noise, then you may analyze the full image. In case of two spots you cannot. So you are using NI Vision spot detection tools are you develop your own ones. And so on …

The image below shows the screenshot of the beam profiler I developed few years ago. It has an internal interface that allows for simple connection with any camera. I never needed any advances statistical analysis of the beam shape, so the software calculates fundamental parameters like max intensity, beam center (CoG, and from Gaussian fit), width. One version allowed for automatic selection of the spot center which gave the possibility to monitor the mentioned parameters always in spot center (that moved with time). It allows also for 3D beam imaging.