Patent ID: 8872963

Claim:
An imaging apparatus comprising: a lens drive unit configured to drive a focus lens; an imaging element configured to image a subject through the focus lens to obtain an image signal; an evaluation value calculation unit configured to read out the image signal obtained by the imaging element based on an interlace system and to calculate an AF evaluation value from the image signal in each field read out based on the interlace system; a determination unit configured to determine whether the continuous AF evaluation values have a distribution of continuous increases and decreases; an in-focus position calculation unit configured to perform a first interpolation calculation for obtaining an interpolation curve from an intermediate value of the AF evaluation values adjacent to each other and calculating an in-focus position when the AF evaluation values are determined to have the distribution of continuous increases and decreases, and performs a second interpolation calculation for obtaining an interpolation curve of the AF evaluation value and calculating an in-focus position when the AF evaluation values are determined to not have the distribution of continuous increases and decreases; and a control unit configured to control the lens drive unit to drive the focus lens to the in-focus position.