Patent ID: 6633683
Filing Date: 2003-10-14
Classification: G06K,G06T,H04N

Abstract:
An adaptive apparatus for spatially reducing noise in a noisy input image signal comprising:a low-pass filter receiving said noisy input image signal to generate a noisy low-spatial frequency image signal; a first pixel-based serial-to-parallel converter receiving the noisy low-spatial frequency image signal to generate a group of noisy low-spatial frequency image parallel signals associated with a locally considered pixel and according to predetermined pixels-window characteristics; a pixel-based local window segmentation processor comparing values of the noisy low-spatial frequency image parallel signals associated with pixels included within the window with the locally considered pixel value to generate segmented local window parallel signals associated with selected pixels; a counter generating a selected-pixels count signal; a second pixel-based serial-to-parallel converter receiving the noisy input image signal to generate a group of noisy input image parallel signals associated with the locally considered pixel and according to the predetermined pixels-window characteristics; a mean estimator combining the noisy input image parallel signals with the segmented local window parallel signals and the selected-pixels count signal to generate a mean pixel value signal associated with the locally considered pixel; a minimum-mean-square-error filter receiving the noisy input image parallel signals, the segmented local window parallel signals, the selected-pixels count signal and the mean pixel value signal to generate a noise-filtered output image signal according to an input noise statistic signal.