Patent ID: 8072511

Claim:
A noise reduction processing apparatus comprising: a three-dimensional noise reduction processing portion comprising: a noise detection portion that, by using image signals of a plurality of frames acquired at different times, detects, for each pixel, a noise amount in a first image signal taken as an input frame; and a calculation portion that performs noise reduction by subtracting the noise amount detected by the noise detection portion from the first image signal and outputs a resulting signal as a second image signal taken as an output frame; a first electronic zoom portion that performs resolution diminution processing on the second image signal outputted from the three-dimensional noise reduction processing portion to generate and output a low-resolution image signal; a frame memory that stores the low-resolution image signal, based on the second image signal, outputted from the first electronic zoom portion; and a second electronic zoom portion that performs resolution augmentation processing on the second image signal stored as the low-resolution image signal in the frame memory to output a resulting signal as the second image signal as acquired in the past to the three-dimensional noise reduction processing portion; wherein the three-dimensional noise reduction processing portion performs three-dimensional noise reduction processing on the first image signal based on the first image signal taken as the input frame and the second image signal fed from the second electronic zoom portion.