Patent ID: 8289411

Claim:
An image processing apparatus executing preprocessing to smoothly perform a movie display of image data composed of a plurality of still image frames obtained by still-image photographing, comprising: an image inputting unit importing said still image frames; a frame interpolating unit applying frame interpolation to said still image frames in time-axis direction in order of photographing, to generate one or more interpolated image frames; a combining unit performing moving addition of one of still image frames and one of said interpolated image frames or one of said interpolated image frames and another one of said interpolated image frames in said time-axis direction, to generate composite image frames; and a smoothing unit increasing smoothness of said movie display by suppressing more high spatial frequency components in said composite image frame by controlling the combining unit to increase, among said still image frames and/or said interpolated image frames which are temporally preceding/succeeding, the number of still image frames and/or interpolated image frames to be used when generating said composite image frames as a display rate of said movie display becomes lower, wherein the smoothing unit further increases the smoothness of said movie display by applying a smoothing filter that performs smoothing on a direction of a motion between frames over said composite image that has performed moving addition, and changes, as said display rate becomes lower, a processing characteristics of said smoothing filter so that either one of a cutting off of lower frequencies in a high-frequency cutoff characteristic of said smoothing filter in said composite image frame, and an increasing of a high spatial frequency cutoff amount of said smoothing filter in said composite image frame, is performed.