Patent ID: 8659648

Claim:
An endoscope apparatus comprising: an illumination section that illuminates a body cavity interior; an image pickup section that picks up an image of return light from the body cavity interior under illumination by the illumination section; an illumination changeover section that is capable of switching between white light and illuminating light of narrow band wavelength illuminated from the illumination section; a first color separation section that separates the image picked up by the image pickup section into a first luminance signal and a first color difference signal; a first color conversion section that converts the signals to first three primary color signals based on the first luminance signal and the first color difference signal; a second color conversion section that converts an output signal from the first color conversion section to a second color difference signal; a signal intensity ratio calculation section that calculates an intensity ratio among the first three primary color signals outputted from the first color conversion section: a table for storing matrix coefficients used for performing color separation matrix calculation on each of the first luminance signal obtained by separation in the first color separation section and the second color difference signal obtained by conversion in the second color conversion section; a control section that switches the matrix coefficients stored in the table, based on the intensity ratio calculated in the signal intensity ratio calculation section; and a second color separation section that performs color separation matrix calculation on each of the first luminance signal obtained by the separation in the first color separation section and the second color difference signal obtained by conversion in the second color conversion section based on the matrix coefficients switched in the control section, to convert the signals to second three primary color signals.