Interest points as a focus measure

In this paper, we propose a novel focus measure that is based on algorithms for interest point detection, particularly on the Fast Hessian detector. The proposed measure is compared with the energy of image gradient and sum-modified Laplacian that are commonly used as focus measures to test its reliability and performance. The measures have been tested on a newly created database containing 84 images (12 images for seven objects). Our algorithm proved to be a good focus measure satisfying all the requirements described in the paper, in some cases it outperformed the other two measures.