Patent ID: 8131098

Claim:
An image processing device comprising: a brightness information calculation portion operable to calculate brightness information of an image signal that can form an image made up of pixels, the calculation being performed per pixel or per pixel region made up of a plurality of pixels; an interest level estimation portion operable to estimate an interest level indicating the degree to which the pixel or the pixel region is visually focused on in the image, based on the brightness information; a vanishing point estimation portion operable to estimate vanishing point information of the image, based on the brightness information; a depth estimation portion operable to (i) estimate a degree of depth based on the interest level and the vanishing point information and (ii) calculate a correction gain for performing a depth correction process on the image signal based on the degree of depth; a depth correction portion operable to perform the depth correction process on the image signal based on the correction gain; and a processor operable to control at least one of the brightness information calculation portion, that interest level estimation portion, the vanishing point estimation portion, the depth estimation portion, and the depth correction portion, wherein the vanishing point estimation portion includes: a border calculation portion operable to calculate border information based on the brightness information and extract characteristic points in border portions within the image based on the border information; a Hough transform portion operable to convert straight lines in the image that connect the characteristic points into points within a Hough space by performing a Hough transform; a distribution calculation portion operable to calculate a histogram distribution for the points within the Hough space; and a vanishing point extraction portion operable to extract the vanishing point information of the image based on the histogram distribution for the points in the Hough space.