Imaging lens design with the aid of an ant colony algorithm

In modern optical design, the calculation of optical merit function based on the ray tracing would be impossible without the aid of a computer. Finding the optimal value of merit function by optimization techniques would also be impossible without the aid of a computer. With the rapid development of computer technology and the emergence of novel optimization techniques, it is a beneficial attempt to apply new optimization techniques to optical design with the aid of high-performance computers, so as to realize intelligent and quick design of the image acquisition lens of high precision. In this paper, the optimization technique of ant colony is employed to design an iris image capture lens consisting of two aspheric lenses with the aid of a desktop computer of a 64-bit processor and dual-core CPU, and the detailed design steps are presented. Imaging performance of the designed image acquisition lenses is quantitatively evaluated by using Zemax software, and the analysis shows that high-resolution image with MTF > 0.4 at the Nyquist frequency of 223 lp/mm below 0.8 field of view (FOV) and optical distortion of less than 0.2% below 0.5 FOV can be acquired, demonstrating a great potential of the ant colony optimization algorithm in quickly designing high-quality optical lenses. We also apply the ACA to the benchmark problems for lens design problem and demonstrated that this method can provide high-quality solution.