This paper proposes a robust auto-focus (AF) measure based on inner energy. In general, the inner energy of noise pixels is close to zero because the magnitude of gradient and the direction of the noise pixels are random. Therefore, the inner energy can effectively eliminate the influence of noise on image quality assessment. But the gradients of near edge points are consistent with those of edge points, so the inner energy of edge pixels is relatively large, and the detail information of the image can be highlighted. Experimental results indicate that compared with traditional methods, the proposed method has higher accuracy, fewer local peaks, stronger robustness and better practicability. In particular, the evaluation results are close to the subjective evaluation of the human eyes. These results illustrate that the proposed method can be applied in automatic focusing.