The research of auto-focusing method for the image mosaic and fusion system with multi-sensor

In modern image processing, due to the development of digital image processing, the focus of the sensor can be automatically set by the digital processing system through computation. In the other hand, the auto-focusing synchronously and consistently is one of the most important factors for image mosaic and fusion processing, especially for the system with multi-sensor which are put on one line in order to gain the wide angle video information. Different images sampled by the sensors with different focal length values will always increase the complexity of the affine matrix of the image mosaic and fusion in next, which potentially reducing the efficiency of the system and consuming more power. Here, a new fast evaluation method based on the gray value variance of the image pixel is proposed to find the common focal length value for all sensors to achieve the better image sharpness. For the multi-frame pictures that are sampled from different sensors that have been adjusted and been regarded as time synchronization, the gray value variances of the adjacent pixels are determined to generate one curve. This curve is the focus measure function which describes the relationship between the image sharpness and the focal length value of the sensor. On the basis of all focus measure functions of all sensors in the image processing system, this paper uses least square method to carry out the data fitting to imitate the disperse curves and give one objective function for the multi-sensor system, and then find the optimal solution corresponding to the extreme value of the image sharpness according to the evaluation of the objective function. This optimal focal length value is the common parameter for all sensors in this system. By setting the common focal length value, in the premise of ensuring the image sharpness, the computing of the affine matrix which is the core processing of the image mosaic and fusion which stitching all those pictures into one wide angle image will be greatly simplified and the efficiency of the image processing system is significantly improved.