Apparatus and method of reducing noise

Abstract

There are provided an apparatus and a method of reducing noise. The apparatus of reducing noise includes: an edge determining module determining whether each pixel of an image corresponds to an edge; a low pass filter module performing low pass filtering of the image in two directions, i.e., vertical and horizontal directions and performing low pass filtering only for the pixel determined not to be the edge; a filter selecting module selecting a filter having a flexible size to be applied to a mask region for each of the images low pass filtered in the two directions based on the average brightness of the entire region and the average brightness of the mask region having a predetermined size; a sigma filter module sigma filtering the mask region using the selected filter for each of the images low pass filtered in the two directions; and an averaging module averaging the image sigma filtered in the two directions, thereby making it possible to adaptively reduce noise and prevent loss of the edge due to blurring of the image.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.