Compositional synthesis of optical imaging systems

This paper introduces a new systematic and complete compositional technique for conceptual design of optical imaging systems from behavioral specifications. There are two key ideas: (1) modeling the structure and behavior of optical components using affine transformations, and (2) using a systematic search algorithm integrated with a powerful algebraic constraint solver to compute three-dimensional layouts of optical components in the design. By embedding our tool in a constraint programming environment, we are able to automate the conceptual design of optical imaging systems - a step performed manually by human designers until now. We demonstrate the power of the method by recreating several designs for imaging systems of copiers.