Endoscope device

Abstract

This endoscope device can simplify the determination of the moving direction of a focusing lens, and can improve the accuracy of auto focusing. The endoscope has the following elements: an optical system having a focusing lens; a lens moving unit which moves the focusing lens along an optical axis thereof; an image capturing unit which obtains an optical image of an object from the optical system as a plurality of images each of which has a different focal position from each other; a moving direction determining section which determines whether to change the observation depth on the basis of the plurality of images, and determines a moving direction toward which the focusing lens is to be moved on the bases of the images; and a drive control unit which controls the lens moving unit to move the focusing lens toward a determined moving direction.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.