Abstract

The success of global optimization routines in optical design relies heavily on the reliability and efficiency of the methods used for system assessment (i.e., merit function evaluation). In fact, this efficiency is also vital in everyday lens design, since the lion's share of computer time is spent in system assessment. Since the merit function is typically evaluated by tracing a limited set of rays, efficiency can be expressed in terms of the number of rays required to obtain a given accuracy in the measure of overall system performance. For simplicity, the Gaussian pupil is adopted throughout this work. The efficiency of a number of standard system assessment schemes is presented, and some novel highly efficient schemes are described. The key to the new schemes lies in coupling appropriate ray coordinates with the method of Gaussian quadrature. The resulting efficiencies are typically an order of magnitude or more ahead of comparatively simple schemes.

© 1988 Optical Society of America