Patent ID: 7835572

Claim:
A method to automatically identify sub-regions of a multi-channel image as containing red-eye, said method comprising: (a) converting said multi-channel image to a modified multi-channel image wherein at least one of said channels is an enhanced luminance channel that has more than 60% of the luminance information of said multi-channel image and at least one of said channels is a saturation channel, and applying a threshold to said enhanced luminance channel, said threshold constructed to produce a flash mask; (b) identifying a sub-region of said flash mask as containing a red-eye region based upon, at least in part, processing said saturation channel by applying a saturation mask to one or more pixels of said image, said saturation mask comparing the standard deviation of the saturation value of a respective pixel to a threshold of 0.15; and (c) removing the identified said red eye from said multi-channel image wherein the above method steps are performed by a computer.