Optical glass selection for color corrected broadband instrumentation: an overview

The aim of this paper is to provide a complete and helpful review of all existing techniques for the selection of optical glasses that are applied during the design of color corrected lens-based systems. The paper fills a gap in the related literature, where there was no contribution bringing all approaches together under a common notation. This allows to identify commonalities and discrepancies, as well as to compare their fundamentals. Special attention has been paid to its application to optical instrumentation working in a wide spectral range (visible and short-wave infrared). All glass selection strategies have been implemented to the design of a broadband lens-based camera case study, which allows establishing a comparison among all methods and their results. A new, to the best of our knowledge, approach is suggested to adapt the focal shift curve over a continuous working spectral range at convenience.