System and method for processing image data using an image signal processor having back-end processing logic

An image signal processing system comprising:

• a back-end pixel processing unit configured to receive a frame of image data, the image frame having been previously processed by an image processing pipeline of the image signal processing system, wherein the back-end pixel processing unit comprises:
• face detection logic configured to receive and process the image frame and to output set of facial detection data indicative of the location of facial features within the image frame;
• tone mapping logic configured to applying tone mapping to the image frame;
• scaling logic configured to scale the image frame to one or more desired output resolutions;
• a back-end statistics processing unit configured to process the scaled image data to collect frequency statistics for the scaled image data;
• encoder/decoder logic configured to apply compression to the scaled image data based at least partially upon the frequency statistics;
• and
• selection logic configured to receive both the image frame and at least one scaled image frame from the scaling logic, and wherein the selection logic is configured select one of either the image frame or the scaled image frame and to provide the selected image frame to the face detection logic.