Patent ID: 7538808

Claim:
A method for luminance noise filtering in an imaging device, comprising: inputting a region of pixel data from an image sensor; determining a virtually filtered luminance from a first processing of said region of pixel data and without using other pixel data for a pixel location within the region; determining a reference luminance for the pixel location from a second processing of said same region of pixel data and without using other pixel data, wherein the reference luminance is determined after respective interpolated color components for the pixel location are determined such that the reference luminance is determined using said respective interpolated color components; selecting between the virtually filtered luminance and the reference luminance as a final luminance of the pixel location depending on an adaptive luminance; determining in a data processor, a threshold value from the adaptive luminance; selecting the virtually filtered luminance if an absolute of a difference between the virtually filtered luminance and the reference luminance is less than or equal to the threshold value; and selecting the reference luminance if the absolute of the difference between the virtually filtered luminance and the reference luminance is greater than the threshold value; wherein the adaptive luminance is determined from an overall brightness of a previous image.