Patent ID: 7199902

Claim:
An image processing method for eliminating noise from electronic data of an input image by smoothing the electronic data, the method comprising: computing a smoothing intensity based on intensities of a predetermined color component output from a pixel of interest and pixels surrounding the pixel of interest, constituting a matrix centered on the pixel of interest; and wherein, in the computing step, the smoothing intensity is computed on the basis of a distribution expression representing the frequency of noise with respect to the predetermined color component in such a manner that when the smoothing intensity with respect to the intensity of the predetermined color component output from the pixel of interest is high, a rate at which the intensity of the predetermined color component output from the pixel of interest is to be distributed to surrounding pixels constituting the matrix is set to a large value, and when the smoothing intensity with respect to the intensity of the predetermined color component output from the pixel of interest is low, the rate at which the intensity of the predetermined color component output from the pixel of interest is to be distributed to surrounding pixels constituting the matrix is set to a small value.