On the focusing of thermal images

In this paper we present a new thermographic image database, suitable for the analysis of automatic focusing measures. This database contains the images of 10 scenes, each of which is represented once for each of 96 different focus positions. Using this database, we evaluate the usefulness of five focus measures with the goal of determining the optimal focus position. Experimental results reveal that the accurate automatic detection of optimal focus position can be achieved with a low computational burden. We also present an acquisition tool for obtaining thermal images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the automatic focusing of thermal images.