Hitachi Industry & Control Solutions, Ltd.

Yukitoshi Shirota

Tomoaki Nishiguchi

Hideharu Ono

Toshiyuki Yokoyama

Iori Umezawa

Toshifumi Inokuchi

A focus control apparatus reduces the degree of out-of-focus of an image of an intense point light source during zooming in contrast-based autofocus control. A zooming lens moves in an optical axis direction to perform magnification change and a focusing lens moves in the optical axis direction to perform focus adjustment and is driven in accordance with a trace curve corresponding to the distance to a subject. A controller evaluates, during the magnification change operation, based on the rate of change in the number of high-luminance pixels at which the number of high-luminance pixels in an output image from the imaging apparatus changes with the zoom magnification, whether or not the focusing lens is driven in accordance with a trace curve corresponding to the distance to the subject before the magnification change operation is performed or a trace curve corresponding to a distance to the subject of infinity.

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Yokohama, Japan

Yukitoshi Shirota