The light pattern reflected from a machined surface contains some information like roughness and profile on the projected surface as expected in the Beckmann-Spizzichino model. In applying the theory into a real reliable measuring device, many parameters such as incident light power, wave length, spot size should be kept a constant optical value. However, the reflected light power is likely to change with the environmental noise, the variations of the light source, the reflectivity of the surface, etc. even though the incident light power is constant. In this study, a method for adjusting the incident light power to keep the reflected light power projected on a CMOS image sensor constant was proposed and a simple adjustment algorithm based on PI digital control was examined. Experiments verified that the proposed method made the surface roughness measurement better and more reliable even under variations of the height of light source.