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Rising sheet surface quality demands by the automotive industry make it necessary to control continuously the roughness of strip steel. Moreover, the optimisation of the deep drawing process requires tight tolerances in the tribological behaviour of the material to achieve higher production rates. High strength steel and aluminium sheet can only be deformed without defects under optimised conditions and homogeneity of the surface. Roughness is an important factor to reach the best product. The AMEPA SRM online roughness measurement system is an established tool for better production control of these properties that delivers roughness information over the length and width of a coil, unlike other optical systems which calculate the roughness from a limited number of intermittent measurements only in the rolling direction, or manually offline by stylus on a very limited number of coil end samples. The measurement method is based on the principle of 2D-triangulation whereby a very thin laser line is projected on the surface and the surface relief is determined by analysing the deformation of the line. This measurement principle comes closer to the mechanical stylus reference measurement than any other optical measurement device, and has a correlation between SRM and stylus within ±10%. The SRM is installed on various production lines in Europe and China, covering the whole range of strip steel products manufactured today, many of which are difficult to measure with other optical systems. Because SRM provides a measurement over a significant part of each coil, it could be used for more complete documentation of this important product property, for tighter production tolerances and as a more precise tool to identify the need for a texturing roll change.