Patent Document ID: 8064718
Application ID: 11996695
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A procedure for providing a cleaned-up picture from a bandwidth-limited, noise-reduced, and data reduced input stream of electronic data representing moving or stationary image information with noise content, said image information containing artefacts due to data reduction and bandwidth limitation, comprising the following steps 1) decoding the data reduced stream of data 2) feeding the data to a first analyzer (7) for global image analysis and to a second analyzer (4) for local image analysis, 3) the output of the first analyzer (7) being a frame-by-frame sharpness function and a frame-by-frame noise level function 4) the output of the second analyzer (4) being a pixel-by-pixel classification of the pixel as part of an edge, part of a ringing artefact, or part of a block edge artefact 5) the noise level output of the first analyzer (7) being combined in a limit calculation block (5) with the output from the second analyzer (4) 6) using the output from the limit calculation block (5) to determine the bandwidth of a noise reducing low-pass filter (6), the bandwidth in (6) being increased on the current pixel, in case of a detected edge, in order to obtain data relating to a noise-reduced image with good contrast 7) the sharpness output from the first analyzer (7) being combined with the output of the second analyzer (4) in a two-dimensional sharpness gain calculation block (8b) 8) applying the gain factor of gain calculation block (8b) in a sharpness enhancement limiter (8c), the pass band of the sharpness enhancement filter having its centre frequency locked to the sharpness value 9) the output being formed as the sum of sharpness-enhanced image detail from the limiter (8c) and the noise reduced signal from the noise reducing filter (6).