System and method for optimizing focus of optical system passively

1. A method for optimizing the focus of a camera optical system, comprising:

providing a sensor for capturing images, a processor, a memory, and a control connected to the sensor to control driver motors for focusing the optical system, the processor is configured to implement the method, which comprises the following steps:

discretizing optical positions or focus distances of the optical system;

initializing an idle counter to zero, the idle counter holds a number of iterations when the optical system is unable to improve focus performance;

driving the optical system to a predetermined initial optical position;

initializing a best position, the best position holds a best focusing distance came across up until a current execution iteration, to a current position;

clearing a sharpness array, the sharpness array holds sharpness values of already processed images;

calculating correspondence for at least one image and obtaining a focus distance value and a sharpness value, wherein the focus distance value denotes a focus distance of the optical system for the at least one image, and the sharpness value denotes a sharpness value calculated for the at least one image;

adding at least one sharpness value to the sharpness array;

calculating a longest increasing subsequence on the sharpness array;

checking if a length of the longest increasing subsequence increases;

clearing the idle counter if the length of the longest increasing subsequence increases;

setting the best position to the current position;

incrementing the idle counter if the length of the longest increasing subsequence does not increase;

checking if a termination threshold is reached;

checking if the current position corresponds to an end of discrete optical positions if the termination threshold is not reached;

driving motors to a next position, if the current position does not correspond to the end of discrete optical positions; and,

going to the best position and terminating the method, if the termination threshold is reached or if the current position corresponds to the end of discrete optical positions.

2. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the discretization of the optical positions is user controlled in the step of discretizing optical positions of the optical system.

3. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the predetermined discretization steps are found empirically in the step of discretizing optical positions of the optical system.

4. The method according to claim 1 , wherein calculated sharpness values are ordered so that focus distance values of calculated images are ordered consecutively in the step of adding at least one sharpness value to the sharpness array.

5. The method according to claim 1 , wherein a sorting pass is carried out on the sharpness array on the focus distance entries in the step of adding at least one sharpness value to the sharpness array, if an overall execution sequence of the focus distance is not ordered.

6. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the step of setting the best position to the current position comprises a sub-step of checking focus performances of the best position and the current position and replacing the best position with the current position if a focus quality of the current position is higher.

7. The method according to claim 1 , further comprising a step of: improving the best position if the termination threshold is reached or if the current position corresponds to the end of discrete optical positions, then going to best position and terminating the process.