Patent ID: 8320641

Claim:
A method for red-eye detection in an acquired digital image comprising: acquiring one or more reference images without a flash; determining any red regions that exist within said one or more reference images; applying an image analysis prefilter to the one or more reference images; applying an image correction analyzer to the one or more reference images based on information gained from the applying of the image analysis prefilter; adapting a chain of multiple image compensation filters based on information gained from the applying of the image correction analyzer, including segmenting the one or more reference images and adapting corrective image processing to be applied differently to each of multiple regions, and adapting a global pixel transformation to be applied uniformly to the entire image; acquiring a main image with a flash of approximately a same scene as said one or more reference images; analyzing the main image to determine any candidate red eye defect regions that exist within the main image; comparing said any red regions determined to exist within said one or more reference images with said any candidate red eye defect regions determined to exist within said main image; and removing as candidate red eye defect regions within said main image any corresponding red regions determined also to exist within said one or more reference images; and applying shape analysis and falsing analysis filters to remaining candidate red eye regions at least including region size and eye shape filters, and eye region falsing filters, preview image filter and metadata based filters; and removing any remaining candidate red eye regions determined to be physically incompatible with known eye defects to have a location within a region that is physically incompatible with known eye defects or to have a high falsing likelihood, or combinations thereof.