| In order to gain valuable market share in the growing consumer digital still camera and camera phone market, camera manufacturers have to continually add and improve existing features to their latest product offerings. Auto-focus (AF) is one such feature, whose aim is to enable consumers to quickly take sharply focused pictures with little or no manual intervention in adjusting the camera's focus lens. While AF has been a standard feature in digital still and cell-phone cameras, consumers often complain about their cameras' slow AF performance, which may lead to missed photographic opportunities, rendering valuable moments and events with undesired out-of-focus pictures. This dissertation addresses this critical issue to advance the state-of-the-art in the digital band-pass filter, passive AF method. This method is widely used to realize AF in the camera industry, where a focus actuator is adjusted via a search algorithm to locate the in-focus position by maximizing a sharpness measure extracted from a particular frequency band of the incoming image of the scene. There are no known systematic methods for automatically deriving the parameters such as the digital pass-bands or the search step-size increments used in existing passive AF schemes. Conventional methods require time consuming experimentation and tuning in order to arrive at a set of parameters which balance AF performance in terms of speed and accuracy ultimately causing a delay in product time-to-market. This dissertation presents a new framework for determining an optimal set of passive AF parameters, named Filter-Switching AF, providing an automatic approach to achieve superior AF performance, both in good and low lighting conditions based on the following performance measures (metrics): speed (total number of iterations), accuracy (offset from truth), power consumption (total distance moved), and user experience (in-focus position overrun). Performance results using three different prototype cameras are presented to further illustrate the real-world AF performance gains achieved by the developed approach. The major contribution of this dissertation is that the developed auto focusing approach can be successfully used by camera manufacturers in the development of the AF feature in future generations of digital still cameras and camera phones. |
