Today, almost all imaging systems include both an optical part and an image processing part in order to improve the final image quality. It therefore seems natural to optimize them simultaneously to obtain the best possible result. However, even if this “co-design” approach is more and more recognized at a conceptual level, it is still rarely used in practice for designing complex lenses with many ajustable parameters and constraints. This is due to the fact that the contribution of image processing is currently difficult to take into account in optical design software. Until now, the field of co-design has thus mainly focused on simpler imaging systems, consisting for example of single co-optimized optical elements such as phase masks. More recently, Robinson and Stork have been working on the possibility of integrating the image processing criterion known as mean square error (MSE) in the optical software Zemax OpticStudio. It is also possible to consider surrogate criteria instead of this MSE, built from more classical optical criteria (modulation transfer function, point spread function, etc.) [Burcklen et al. (2018)]. In this study, we investigate the possibility of implementing the MSE criterion in the CodeV optical design software in a way that is easily usable by an optical designer. We compare systems co-designed with this approach to systems jointly optimized with surrogate criteria or conventionally optimized. We focus on the performance differences between these different approaches and on the opportunities offered by CodeV for co-design.
|