Patent ID: 7821578

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a spatial noise reducer that is arranged to reduce noise artifacts in a video signal in a spatial domain; a temporal noise reducer that is arranged to reduce noise artifacts in a video signal in a temporal domain; a tone determination module wherein tone of a pixel is determined, such that when a pixel is determined to correspond to a particular tone, then the spatial and temporal noise reducers are effectively skipped for that pixel; a selector that automatically selects a mode of operation between a parallel mode and a cascade mode based at least in part on characteristics of the video signal, wherein the spatial noise reducer and the temporal noise reducer are arranged in a parallel configuration when the parallel mode is selected by the selector and in a cascade configuration when the cascade mode is selected by the selector; and a noise estimator that is arranged to estimate a noise level associated with the video signal and provides an output corresponding to the noise level estimate, wherein parameters determined from the noise level estimate are provided to the spatial noise reducer and the temporal noise reducer to optimize reduction of the noise artifacts.