Subject of study. Developed methods for synthesis of freeform illumination optics (ellipsoid, Monge-Ampere, string, and flow line methods) do not contain a correct description of the transformation of input and output wavefronts determined by the wave aberration function, do not consider the image quality criteria, and are not suitable for the calculation of imaging systems. The most common methods for synthesis of freeform elements of imaging systems (simultaneous multiple surface and ray-mapping methods) are also not ubiquitous because they are aimed at realization of a specific system configuration and, at least, require modification to solve a specific task. The largest complication in the synthesis stages of systems of imaging optics is the determination of the initial system scheme. Design of a method for synthesis of optical systems that does not require a starting point is a highly relevant objective of applied optics. A method allowing the synthesis of freeform optical surfaces for imaging systems using an artificial neural network is presented in this paper. Method. A neural network was built upon radial-basis functions and uses the geometric mapping method to generate the coordinates of the desired optical surface during backward ray tracing. The neural network was trained on different numbers of optical systems, which were automatically generated with variations in structural parameters and positions of the object and image. Main results. The method was demonstrated to operate effectively using more than 17,000 training systems at the ray set dimension of M=4096. The model of a flat-hyperbolic lens calculated using this method has a wave aberration of W < 5 x 10(-2) for wavelengths within the diffraction tolerance. Practical significance. The developed method can be used to design high-performance imaging systems. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group
展开▼
