Optiland: Open-Source Optical Design Software in Python

The Journal of Open Source Software, vol. 11, pp. 11170

Abstract

Optiland (Harrison, 2026b) is an open-source optical design package written in Python.It offers a comprehensive platform for the design, analysis, and optimization of complex optical systems, catering to a wide audience from professional engineers and researchers to students and educators.Optiland handles a broad range of optical systems, from classical refractive and reflective designs to advanced freeform and computational optics.Core features include sequential ray tracing, a rich library of surface types (spherical, aspheric, freeform), optimization and tolerancing support, and a suite of analysis tools for evaluating optical performance (e.g., spot diagrams, wavefront analysis, modulation transfer function).A key feature of Optiland is its dual-backend architecture, which allows users to switch between a NumPy (Harris et al., 2020) backend for fast CPU computations and a PyTorch (Paszke et al., 2019) backend for GPU acceleration and automatic differentiation.This enables the integration of Optiland with machine learning workflows and gradient-based optimization, as all calculations are differentiable.Optiland also includes a graphical user interface (GUI) for interactive design and analysis.Further documentation is available online (Harrison, 2026a).

Authors 4

1. Kramer Harrison
   Affiliation as printed

   Independent Researcher

2. Manuel Fragata Mendes

   Friedrich Schiller University Jena

   Affiliation as printed

   Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany

3. Corné Haasjes Aachen Department of Ophthalmology, Leiden University Medical Center Department of Radiation Oncology Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center

   Leiden University Medical Center

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Ophthalmology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

   Department of Radiation Oncology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

   Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

4. Grégoire Hein
   Affiliation as printed

   Independent Researcher