Automatic image performance balancing in lens optimization.

In the final stage of lens design, it is usually a critical step to balance the optical performance of a lens system across the sampled fields, which is achieved by adjusting the weights to these fields. Because the current optical design software packages use fixed weights in the optimization process, the task of weight adjustment is left to the optical designer, who has to change the weights manually after each optimization trail. However, this process may take a very long time to finish, especially when many fields of the lens system are sampled, and the results are subjectively affected by the designer's design experience. In this paper, we propose an automatic performance balancing method. An automatic outer loop is added in the optimization process. The weight for each sampled field and azimuth is calculated appropriately according to the actual performance of the current design and the system requirements, and it is applied to the corresponding field and azimuth automatically in the next optimization trial. The method is successfully implemented in CODE V, and design examples show that it is very effective.