Patent ID: 7598989

Claim:
An image pickup system comprising: a block extracting unit for extracting a block area with a predetermined size from a signal of an image pickup device; an obtaining unit for obtaining a temperature of the image pickup device and a gain of the signal; a transforming unit for transforming the signal in the block area extracted by the block extracting unit into a signal in a frequency space; a noise estimator for estimating an amount of noise of a frequency component except for a zero-order component based on a combination of a zero-order component in the signal in the frequency space transformed by the transforming unit, and the temperature and signal gain provided by the obtaining unit; a noise reducing unit for reducing noise of the frequency component except for the zero-order component based on the amount of noise estimated by the noise estimator; and a compressing unit for compressing the zero-order component and the frequency component except for the zero-order component from which the noise is reduced.