A method for wide-angle infrared camera on-orbit refocusing based on sub-pixel error compensation of star points is proposed to solve the problems of long refocusing cycles and low efficiency caused by atmospheric conditions, land richness, moon phase angle, and other factors. By accurately locating the centroid of star point images without atmospheric degradation and extracting clarity evaluation indicators, the method effectively avoids the influence of external factors, improves the refocusing efficiency, and ensures the refocusing accuracy. Firstly, adaptive threshold centroid method and Gaussian fitting method are used to extract centroid estimation values for star point images; According to image signal-to-noise ratio and energy concentration of star point targets to determine the optimal factor, and construct an error compensation model for accurate centroid localization; Extract the waveform full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the point spread function from the image as an evaluation index for clarity; Set up infrared images of star points with different spectral ranges and energy concentrations as on-orbit focus detection images, and use centroid method, Gaussian fitting method, and the method proposed in this paper to extract target centroids and estimate FWHM. The experimental results show that the average errors of centroid extraction for the three methods are 0.1195, 0.0107, and 0.0027, and the root mean square errors (RMSE) are 0.1210, 0.0124, and 0.0085, respectively. The method proposed in this paper has the smallest centroid extraction error and the best stability. When the energy concentration is between 0.4-0.8, the average error of centroid extraction using this method is less than 0.01, which is superior to other methods. On this basis, the FWHM average accuracy extracted by the method proposed in this article has been improved by more than three times, and is not affected by the randomness of the centroid position of star points. It has high reliability and stability for refocusing, meeting the requirements of on-orbit refocusing.