Citation

If you use DeepLens in your research, please cite the relevant papers below.

Differentiable ray tracing was developed by the KAUST Computational Imaging Group. The first version of the differentiable ray tracer was implemented by Dr. Congli Wang on Mitsuba2:

@article{sun2021end,
  title={End-to-end complex lens design with differentiable ray tracing},
  author={Sun, Qilin and Wang, Congli and Qiang, Fu and Xiong, Dun and Wolfgang, Heidrich},
  journal={ACM Trans. Graph},
  volume={40},
  number={4},
  pages={1--13},
  year={2021}
}

Later, Dr. Congli Wang implemented the first PyTorch version of the differentiable ray tracer (dO):

@article{wang2022differentiable,
  title={do: A differentiable engine for deep lens design of computational imaging systems},
  author={Wang, Congli and Chen, Ni and Heidrich, Wolfgang},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging},
  volume={8},
  pages={905--916},
  year={2022},
  publisher={IEEE}
}

Currently, Xinge Yang builds and maintains DeepLens. The automated lens design work demonstrates the capability of differentiable optics compared to classical optical design:

@article{yang2024curriculum,
  title={Curriculum learning for ab initio deep learned refractive optics},
  author={Yang, Xinge and Fu, Qiang and Heidrich, Wolfgang},
  journal={Nature communications},
  volume={15},
  number={1},
  pages={6572},
  year={2024},
  publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
}

A differentiable ray-wave model is introduced for simulating and optimizing hybrid refractive-diffractive lenses:

@inproceedings{yang2024end,
  title={End-to-end hybrid refractive-diffractive lens design with differentiable ray-wave model},
  author={Yang, Xinge and Souza, Matheus and Wang, Kunyi and Chakravarthula, Praneeth and Fu, Qiang and Heidrich, Wolfgang},
  booktitle={SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Conference Papers},
  pages={1--11},
  year={2024}
}

Differentiable non-sequential ray tracing and polarization tracing are developed in:

@article{yang2026waveguide,
  title={End-to-end differentiable design of geometric waveguide displays},
  author={Yang, Xinge and Liu, Zhaocheng and Nie, Zhaoyu and Fan, Qingyuan and Shi, Zhimin and Bonar, Jim and Heidrich, Wolfgang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.04370},
  year={2026}
}