Patent ID: 7652698

Claim:
A shading correction circuit of an electronic camera, comprising: an image pickup device having photo detectors arranged on its receptive surface; and a shading correction part which performs shading correction on an output signal of said image pickup device, wherein: said image pickup device has an effective pixel area which has effective pixels arranged in two dimensions and performs photoelectric conversion on an object image to generate an image signal, and an upper optical black part which has light-shielding pixels arranged in a horizontal direction of said effective pixel area, the light-shielded pixels being read before any other image signal in said effective pixel area; said shading correction part has a correction coefficient generating part which extracts a variation in shading according to an output of said upper optical black part be fore an image signal of said effective pixel area is read and generates a correction coefficient for the variation, and a correction processing part which performs shading correction by using the correction coefficient on the image signal of said effective pixel area continuously read after the output of said upper optical black part; said correction coefficient generating part further has a block extracting part which extracts a block including a plurality of photo detectors from said upper optical black part, and a block average value generating part which calculates an average value of outputs of the photo detectors included in the block; said correction coefficient generating part generates the correction coefficient by using the average value; said block extracting part sections said upper optical black part into a plurality of blocks each including the plurality of photo detectors; said correction coefficient generating part further has an interpolation calculating part which determines an amount of variation in shading by interpolating the average value generated by said block average value generating part; and said correction coefficient generating part generates the correction coefficient by using the amount of variation in shading, said correction coefficient generating part further comprising: a variation determination part which determines a difference in amounts of variation in shading of each pixel and its horizontally adjoining pixel; and a random number generator for modifying variation points of the amounts of variation in shading with random numbers if the difference in the amounts of variation in shading is smaller than a predetermined value, wherein when a difference between amounts of variation in shading of each pixel and its horizontally adjoining pixel is smaller than the predetermined value, the variation points are arranged unevenly in a vertical direction of said effective pixel area.