Method of motion compensated temporal noise reduction

A method of reducing noise in a sequence of digital video frames, comprising the steps of:

• estimating motion between a current noisy frame and a previous frame, to generate motion vectors indicating relative motion between the pixels in the current noisy frame and the corresponding pixels in the previous frame;
• and
• removing noise from the current noisy frame by computing the weighted average of pixels in the current noise frame and said corresponding pixels in the previous frame based on the motion vectors, to generate a noise-reduced output frame.

A noise reduction system for reducing noise in a sequence of digital video frames, comprising:

• a motion estimator that estimates motion between a current noisy frame and a previous noise-reduced frame, to generate motion vectors indicating relative motion between the pixels in the current noisy frame and the corresponding pixels in the previous noise-reduced frame;
• and
• a noise reducer that removes noise from the current noisy frame by computing the weighted average of pixels in the current noise frame and said corresponding pixels in the previous noise-reduced frame based on the motion vectors, to generate a noise-reduced output frame.