Visible imaging system optical design by continuous optimization of glasses

Choice of lenses materials in optical design is crucial to reduce aberrations down to an acceptable level. Commercial glasses do not cover a continuous range of refractive indices and must be selected in a discrete library making them discrete variables in any optimization design process to achieve the final optical design to be manufactured. This paper proposes an alternative method to avoid the complicated discrete variables optimization process thanks to a two-steps continuous optimization methodology starting with fictitious glasses models before jumping to the real glasses optimization design. The illustration of this process and achieved results are presented on an example of optical system which validates our proposed method.