Patent ID: 7683941

Claim:
An image pickup apparatus comprising: a solid-state image pickup device for acquiring an image signal by photoelectric conversion of an optical image formed; signal amplifying means for amplifying, as to the image signal supplied from said solid-state image pickup device, all pixels of color components of an image according to given gains of the individual color components; average value calculating means for calculating average values of pixel values of individual color components constituting an image of each frame generated by said signal amplifying means; and gain calculating means for calculating gains by comparing the average values of the pixel values of the individual color components of the image of each frame calculated by said average value calculating means for all the frames in one cycle of flicker generation, calculating maximum values using the average values for all the frames in one cycle of flicker generation, calculating gains according to the maximum values for adjusting the average values to a maximum range, and for outputting the gains as gains of the individual color components to be supplied to said signal amplifying means.