Patent ID: 7760264

Claim:
A method of creating an image which includes the steps of: obtaining a representation of the brightness of an image, said representation being linear over the whole range of brightness, by calculating, for each of a set of pixels (x, y) in a two dimensional array, an estimate of the true image intensity (i xy ) as a weighted average of n samples of the apparent image intensity (v n,xy ) as i ^ x ⁢ ⁢ y = ∑ n ⁢ w n , x ⁢ ⁢ y ( v n , x ⁢ ⁢ y - ∑ n ⁢ b n ∏ n ⁢ a n ) ∑ n ⁢ w n , x ⁢ ⁢ y where a n and b n are the gradient a and offset b measured between image n and image n−1 (a 1 =1; b 1 =0) when w n , x ⁢ ⁢ y = { ∏ n ⁢ a n v min < v n , x ⁢ ⁢ y < v max 0 when v n , x ⁢ ⁢ y ≥ v max 0 v n , x ⁢ ⁢ y ≤ v min where v n,xy is the apparent intensity measured, n is greater than or equal to 2, and v min and v max are defined to maximize the signal to noise ratio and discard insignificant, that is saturated or near zero, values; thereafter saving each of the values i xy together with other data representing the image; and outputting the image to a display or to a printing device.