Experimental ray tracing for characterization of optical components

In the recent past, experimental ray tracing (ERT) proved to be an all round solution for the characterization of various optical components with respect to a wide range of properties. In most cases, a single measurement suffice to provide all parameters of interest. Being a real-life realization of the light propagation model found in optical design tools, experimental ray tracing readily offers all the analysis possibilities familiar to the optical designer. Using ERT, the same analysis performed on the design can also be conducted on the real object allowing for maximum comparability between both production steps. With this talk, we summarize the latest developments around this technique achieved within our research group and demonstrate its versatile capabilities by various measurement examples, including determination of effective focal length and modulation transfer function from spherical and aspherical lenses, power maps of progressive addition lenses, performance tests of secondary LED optics as well as surface retrieval of aspherical lenses from transmission test.