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Tuberculosis and other mycobacteriosis are serious illnesses which control is based on early diagnosis. A technique commonly used consists of analyzing sputum images for detecting bacilli. However, the analysis of sputum is time consuming and requires highly trained personnel to avoid high errors. Image-processing techniques provide a good tool for improving the manual screening of samples. In this paper, a new autofocus algorithm and a new bacilli detection technique is presented with the aim to attain a high specificity rate and reduce the time consumed to analyze such sputum samples. This technique is based on the combined use of some invariant shape features together with a simple thresholding operation on the chromatic channels. Some feature descriptors have been extracted from bacilli shape using an edited dataset of samples. A -means clustering technique was applied for classification purposes and the sensitivity vs specificity results were evaluated using a standard ROC analysis procedure. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]