On the focusing of thermal images
This work addresses the need for automated focusing in thermal imaging, which is incremental as it applies existing focus measures to a new domain.
The authors tackled the problem of automatically determining optimal focus positions for thermal images by creating a new database and evaluating six focus measures, achieving accurate detection with low computational cost.
In this paper we present a new thermographic image database suitable for the analysis of automatic focus measures. This database consists of 8 different sets of scenes, where each scene contains one image for 96 different focus positions. Using this database we evaluate the usefulness of six focus measures with the goal to determine the optimal focus position. Experimental results reveal that an accurate automatic detection of optimal focus position is possible, even with a low computational burden. We also present an acquisition tool able to help the acquisition of thermal images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study about automatic focus of thermal images.