Spatial-temporal noise reduction filter for image devices

Digital image sequences are prone to high noise levels in low light conditions, due to the increased gains. The presence of noise degrades visual quality and decreases the performance of subsequent processing tasks, such as object tracking, and video compression. We propose a denoising technique for camera systems. Our proposed structure is composed of an edge preserving spatial filter, digital image stabilization and motion adaptive temporal filter. Using spatial and temporal motion data, our proposed motion detector is shown to be efficient in reducing artifacts, such as ghost-tail or blurring caused by recursive temporal filtering methods.