A passive auto-focus camera control system

This paper presents a passive auto-focus camera control system which can easily achieve the function of auto-focus with no necessary of any active component (e.g., infrared or ultrasonic sensor) in comparison with the conventional active focus system. To implement the technique we developed, the hardware system including the adjustable lens with CMOS sensor and servo motor, an 8051 image capture micro-controller, a field programmable gate array (FPGA) sharpness measurement circuit, a pulse width modulation (PWM) controller, and a personal digital assistant (PDA) image displayer was constructed. The discrete wavelet transformation (DWT), the morphology edge enhancement sharpness measurement algorithms, and the self-organizing map (SOM) neural network were used in developing the control mechanism of the system. Compared with other passive auto-focus methods, the method we proposed has the advantages of lower computational complexity and easier hardware implementation.