Efficient Proxy Raytracer for Optical Systems using Implicit Neural Representations

Abstract: Ray tracing is a widely used technique for modeling optical systems, involving sequential surface-by-surface computations, which can be computationally intensive. We propose Ray2Ray, a novel method that leverages implicit neural representations to model optical systems with greater efficiency, eliminating the need for surface-by-surface computations in a single pass end-to-end model. Ray2Ray learns the mapping between rays emitted from a given source and their corresponding rays after passing through a given optical system in a physically accurate manner. We train Ray2Ray on nine off-the-shelf optical systems, achieving positional errors on the order of 1{\mu}m and angular deviations on the order 0.01 degrees in the estimated output rays. Our work highlights the potential of neural representations as a proxy for optical raytracer.