Realizing ‘First Time Right’ designs of imaging systems using off-the-shelf lenses

Abstract

Stock lenses are attractive components in optical system design, offering lower cost and ready availability when compared to custom lenses. However, the lack of effective (optimization) tools to design systems with stock lenses often leads to a manual, thus time-consuming and highly iterative design process with low success rate and clearly non-ideal results.In this work, we present an automatic optical design tool that uses only stock lenses from known suppliers to generate lens systems directly from the specifications and constraints given by the user, without requiring any nominal starting or reference design. To efficiently master this complex problem of selecting working stock lens combinations, our proposed tool makes use of the 'First Time Right' design method to generate constraint stock-based lens systems of both finite and infinite conjugate configurations from scratch. The method relies on Fermat's principle and enables a highly systematic generation and very fast evaluation of arbitrary lens designs. This all-analytic approach makes the pre-selection and positioning of stock lenses highly efficient computationally.We will demonstrate and discuss the extensive and fast exploration of stock lens solutions offered by the stock lens-based design tool using several-practical lens design examples. These results clearly highlight the tool's capabilities for streamlined stock lens-based system exploration and the cost-versus-performance analysis.