An increase in the number of frames and computational complexity of the focus measure causes the shape-from-focus (SFF) method to become time consuming and occupy a lot of memory. As such, these factors become a limitation for using SFF techniques in real-time applications. However, the computational time can be significantly reduced using a parallel implementation of these methods on multiple cores. In this article, various SFF methods are compared in a parallel computing environment. The intent of this research is to analyze the speedup of various focus-measuring methods using a different number of cores to determine the optimal number of cores required for SFF applications. © 2013, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.