Using saddle points for challenging optical design tasks
conference paper
The present research is part of an effort to develop tools that make the lens design process more systematic. In typical optical design tasks, the presence of many local minima in the optical merit function landscape makes design non-trivial. With the method of Saddle Point Construction (SPC) which was developed recently ([F. Bociort and M. van Turnhout, Opt. Engineering 48, 063001 (2009)]) new local minima are obtained efficiently from known ones by adding and removing lenses in a systematic way. To illustrate how SPC and special properties of the lens design landscape can be used, we will present the step-by-step design of a wide-angle pinhole lens and the automatic design of a 9-lens system which, after further development with traditional techniques, is capable of good performance. We also give an example that shows how to visualize the saddle point that can be constructed at any surface of any design of an imaging system that is a local minimum.
Topics
TNO Identifier
523280
ISSN
0277786X
ISBN
9781628412192
Publisher
SPIE
Article nr.
919204
Editor(s)
Mahajan, V.N.
Johnson, R.B.
Mahajan, V.N.
Thibault, S.
Johnson, R.B.
Mahajan, V.N.
Thibault, S.
Collation
8 p.