An AI Curriculum for Learning Lens Design

Abstract

Optical lens design has traditionally relied on incrementally improving and combining existing designs in a largely manual process. Automated optimization strategies typically fail to discover superior solutions far from the starting configuration due to local minima in the optimization landscape, while simultaneously avoiding degenerate or non-physical geometries. This inability to automatically discover new designs is particularly limiting in the design of computational imaging systems, where the complex interactions between optical design and algorithmic processing defy classical heuristics and intuitions.