Patent ID: 8154628

Claim:
An image processing apparatus for correcting an input image signal pixel by pixel to generate a corrected image signal, comprising: a filter unit for determining and outputting a luminance distribution of a pixel to be corrected and pixels neighboring the pixel to be corrected; a correction gain calculation unit for determining a correction gain of the pixel to be corrected from the output of the filter unit; and an operation unit for performing an operation on the input image signal pixel by pixel using the correction gain determined by the correction gain calculation unit; wherein the output of the filter unit is an average luminance of the pixel to be corrected and pixels neighboring the pixel to be corrected; the operation performed by the operation unit is multiplication; and the correction gain calculation unit calculates the correction gain so that the average luminance multiplied by the correction gain is a monotonically increasing function with respect to the average luminance, and the correction gain becomes small when the average luminance is large, and the correction gain becomes large when the average luminance is small.