Introducing the Photonium Patent Corpus: 13,091 imaging lenses from US patents

Modern lens design differs drastically from traditional textbook methods, and almost all of this innovation happens within closed-source companies. The only public window into these designs is unstructured patent data. In the past, attempts have been made at curating this data into usable databases, with the most comprehensive database LensView holding over 30,000 classic optical designs; however, it has not been updated in years. Other available databases are far smaller: lens-designs.com offers ~1,600 design files mined from patents and textbooks, and sample libraries shipped with optical-design software have similar amounts.

The Photonium Patent Corpus addresses this gap. We extracted 13,091 imaging lens prescriptions from 2,239 US patents, with 72% from 2015 onwards, creating a window into modern lens design rather than the classical forms that dominate prior datasets. Every design is cross-checked against its source patent and independently raytraced, allowing it to serve as a starting point for optimization, a reference for design-space benchmarking, or training data for machine-learning approaches to lens design.

The corpus

The corpus spans sub-millimeter scale (smartphone) to over a meter of focal length (long telephoto), with EFLs from 0.09 mm to 1,334 mm, f-numbers from f/0.9 through f/71, and HFOVs from under 1° to 110°, with a large concentration around smartphone lenses. Aspheric complexity spans the full range, from purely spherical heritage designs to modern smartphone forms with even aspheric coefficients up to r⁴⁰ and odd aspheres up to r¹⁹.

Application composition and embodiment density. Smartphone main cameras lead at ~46%, with consumer photographic (DSLR/mirrorless) lenses and smartphone telephoto/ultrawide/periscope variants making up the rest. Most patents contain 5 or fewer embodiments; a long tail goes to 15+.

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F/# vs HFOV. The dense cluster at f/1.4–2.4 / 30–50° is the smartphone main + ultrawide region; the looser cloud at f/2.8–5.6 / narrower fields is consumer photographic and telephoto.

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Top 15 company families by design count. Largan Precision dominates at 4,140 designs, followed by Olympus (2,762), AAC Optics, Canon, and Sunny Optical. The corpus skews heavily toward smartphone-camera lens specialists, reflecting how much of the last decade's patent volume has come from that segment.

Issue-year distribution. The corpus is concentrated in the last decade of filings, with a long tail back to 1981 for older photographic-lens patents.

Patent fidelity

Published patent prescriptions often contain errors: errors that a reader can skim past but that a raytrace cannot. A good design raytraces well; a design that doesn't raytrace well points to transcription errors. These errors take many forms: missing digits or decimal points, wrong coefficients and exponents, missing negative signs, and miscopied transcriptions, all of which cause focus to be lost and RMS spots to blow up. When an error is recoverable, either via sister-patent comparison or manual analysis, we apply the proposed correction and then keep the design if it raytraces well.

To validate the fidelity of each design, we raytrace them via a custom fork of Optiland. We first benchmarked this engine against Zemax OpticStudio: tracing the identical pupil through both engines, Optiland reproduces Zemax's RMS spot size vs field and its ray fans on well-corrected designs (see the engine cross-check for details). Then, we raytraced every design we extracted, surfacing a range of typos in the patents themselves, most of which we could manually fix:

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Missing decimal US-11092776-B2 ex3. A conic coefficient claims to be a 7-digit integer, when in reality a decimal point is missing.

Extreme exponent US-9726860-B2 ex3. The conic coefficient on surface 7 has a 10⁵⁰ exponent, which is clearly wrong; 10⁰⁰ is right.

Incorrect surface numbering US-10254513-B2 ex3. The aspheric block's Surface # header reads 2 3 4 6 6 7: surface 5 has been mislabeled as 6, duplicating its neighbor.

Wrong-sign conic US-12360347-B2 ex7. A conic is published as +90, where four identical-geometry family-twin patents publish -90.

Coefficient sign flip US-11885939-B2 ex6. The A10 coefficient on surface 6 has the wrong sign and should be negative.

Exponent error US-9547154-B2 ex3. The A14 coefficient on surface 2 should have an exponent of 10¹, not 10⁰.

Wrong digit US-10444475-B2 ex6. A single digit is wrong in the A8 coefficient of surface 3: it should read 1.5744, not 1.6744. We caught this by finding a family-twin patent which has the same prescription except this field, and traces an order of magnitude tighter.

Aspheric coefficients corrupted US-9523841-B1 ex2. The A14 cells at surfaces 9 and 10 are 6 orders of magnitude higher than other aspheric coefficients, and match the conic coefficients exactly. The real coefficients are not in the patent.

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We then evaluate each prescription on the RMS spot size of every field. Unfortunately, many patents do not provide clear apertures or vignetting coefficients; thus, we trace every design at full field across the entire pupil and record how much is actually vignetted. As expected, the more extreme the field the more extreme the vignetting, so the outermost fields of fast wide lenses pass only a fraction of the pupil:

Fields traced per design (left) and vignetting composition by field (right). Most designs trace every sampled field; the rest vignette at the outermost fields, which marks the working-FOV cutoff. The vignetting composition climbs from axial (mostly <5%) to the edge field (often ≥50% for fast/wide lenses). A design only ships if its inner fields (on-axis through mid-field) hold robust RMS under 50 µm with at least 100 of 127 rays surviving (so every shipped design is sharp), while the un-gated outer fields preserve the faithful soft corners of fast/wide lenses.

Further, of the rays that do survive the trace, a small number can still distort the result. With the prevalence of highly sensitive aspherics, rays at the edge of the pupil can refract millimeters away from the rest of the bundle, causing traditional RMS metrics to report inflated values. In a real lens these grazing edge rays would most likely be vignetted away by the system's mechanical apertures, which patents rarely specify. To provide a clearer picture of the actual lens' performance, we instead use a robust version of RMS spot size, filtering out stray outlier rays to reflect the actual convergence at the image plane and allowing us to report a more honest performance metric:

One field of US-9599792-B2 ex2 traced at full aperture over the sunflower-127 pupil, with the core magnified at right. 127 rays are launched; 117 reach the image. 115 land in a 1.7 µm core, while two rays graze the aperture boundary and land 501 and 279 µm out (left), dragging the mean-centroid RMS to 53 µm. The robust metric rejects those two strays and reports the 1.7 µm spot the lens actually forms.

Raw RMS vs robust RMS across the corpus. Points above the diagonal are designs where stray rays inflate the raw metric: the median raw/robust inflation is 1.68× at each design's worst field. The two agree on designs that are genuinely soft and diverge where stray rays would otherwise make a good design look bad.

Raytrace results

We trace every design at the F/d/C wavelengths over fields evenly spaced from on-axis out to the stated maximum HFOV, with 127 rays per field over a sunflower distribution. On-axis, the median design sits well inside the diffraction limit (median RMS/Airy 0.46), with 78.4% of designs at or below the Airy radius and 93.9% under 5 µm of absolute spot. As expected, the faster the design, the farther it is from the diffraction limit.

On-axis RMS normalized by Airy radius, broken out by F/# class.

Sharpness drops toward the corner. The median on-axis RMS is 0.83 µm, while the median full-aperture worst-field robust RMS is 2.45 µm, and the softest fast/wide designs run into the hundreds of microns at the extreme corner. The per-field median climbs several-fold from axis to edge, with the soft tail reaching those extremes.

Best-of-λ robust RMS spot radius distribution by sampled field, log scale.

What's in the corpus

Each design is delivered as a matched pair of files, alongside a single manifest that indexes the whole corpus:

• a Zemax .zmx prescription that opens directly in OpticStudio, or any tool that reads the ZMX format;
• an Optiland .json that loads into the open-source Optiland engine via Optic.from_dict(), ready to trace, analyze, or optimize in Python;
• one row in the corpus manifest (provided as both .csv and .json) carrying metadata including provenance, optical specs, and raytrace results.

Below are cross-sections from six designs in the corpus, chosen to span the corpus's diversity in both form and performance.

US-11340432-B2 ex2 · 3.8 mm f/1.7

best-λ RMS by field, axial→edge (µm)0.6 · 0.8 · 1.0 · 1.0 · 0.9  (5/8 fields imaged)

US-10185125-B2 ex11 · 3.1 mm f/2.0

best-λ RMS by field, axial→edge (µm)0.8 · 0.9 · 0.9 · 1.1 · 1.0 · 1.2 · 1.5 · 1.7

US-8335043-B2 ex9 · 6.5 mm f/2.8

best-λ RMS by field, axial→edge (µm)0.5 · 4.9 · 2.5 · 3.9 · 4.5 · 4.6 · 4.1 · 2.7

US-7508593-B2 ex1 (mid zoom) · 15.4 mm f/4.0

best-λ RMS by field, axial→edge (µm)0.6 · 1.3 · 1.9 · 1.9 · 1.7 · 2.1 · 3.4 · 9.5

US-10156700-B2 ex2 · 5.0 mm f/1.4

best-λ RMS by field, axial→edge (µm)25.0 · 25.3 · 24.7 · 23.2 · 24.4 · 24.0 · 28.9 (7/8 fields imaged)

US-9869843-B2 ex6 · 2.9 mm f/1.8

best-λ RMS by field, axial→edge (µm)0.7 · 0.9 · 1.1 · 1.4 · 1.5 · 1.6 · 0.9 (7/8 fields imaged)

You can view a full 50-design cross-section here, or download the 50-design sample (matched Zemax .zmx + Optiland .json files and the manifest).

Scope and limitations

• Symmetric refractive lenses only. We only extract designs which contain all-refractive elements, and exclude those with reflective elements, GRIN media, diffractive elements, freeform elements, etc.
• Wavelengths default to the visible range. We do not parse each patent's stated wavelengths; every design is evaluated at the standard visible F/d/C lines.
• Zoom lenses are extracted as separate embodiments. Multi-position zoom prescriptions get extracted as a separate json for every given position within the patent itself.
• Other excluded designs. We drop patent prescriptions we can't parse cleanly as well as designs that fail the raytrace inclusion gate (inner-field and mid-field robust RMS ≥ 50 µm, or significant inner-field vignetting). We also deduplicate all prescriptions that repeat: 6,142 additional designs we extracted from patent text are exact duplicates of 2,790 designs in the corpus. We provide references to all duplicate designs in the manifest.
• Additional errors. We attempt to either fix or drop all prescriptions which raytrace poorly. However, we do not guarantee that the prescriptions which raytrace well are error-free; some errors can still result in adequate raytraces.
• Patent notice. This corpus is a collection of patented optical designs drawn from published US patents, many of which remain in force. Anyone using these designs is responsible for confirming their patent status; the corpus is offered as-is.

Access and licensing

Users of the Photonium Insight software now have access to the corpus as part of the lens database. For standalone use, the corpus is also available under license for both academic and commercial use - please fill out the form below to request access and we will get back to you:

The Photonium Patent Corpus is built and maintained by Photonium. Questions or access requests: founders@photonium.ai.