End-to-end surface optimization for light control

Sun, Yuou, Deng, Bailin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0158-7670 and Zhang, Juyong 2025. End-to-end surface optimization for light control. ACM Transactions on Graphics 10.1145/3732284

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Abstract

Designing a freeform surface to reflect or refract light to achieve a target distribution is a challenging inverse problem. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end optimization strategy for an optical surface mesh. Our formulation leverages a novel differentiable rendering model, and is directly driven by the difference between the resulting light distribution and the target distribution. We also enforce geometric constraints related to fabrication requirements, to facilitate CNC milling and polishing of the designed surface. To address the issue of local minima, we formulate a face-based optimal transport problem between the current mesh and the target distribution, which makes effective large changes to the surface shape. The combination of our optimal transport update and rendering-guided optimization produces an optical surface design with a resulting image closely resembling the target, while the geometric constraints in our optimization help to ensure consistency between the rendering model and the final physical results. The effectiveness of our algorithm is demonstrated on a variety of target images using both simulated rendering and physical prototypes.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Publisher:	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
ISSN:	0730-0301
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	7 May 2025
Date of Acceptance:	25 March 2025
Last Modified:	13 May 2025 09:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/178125

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