Patent 7336818 was granted and assigned to Sony on February, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The present invention allows an image to be processed corresponding to the mixture of a background image and an image of a moving object. A region specifying unit specifies a mixed region wherein foreground object components making up foreground objects and background object components making up background objects are mixed, and a non-mixed region configured of one of foreground object components making up foreground objects or background object components making up background objects, and outputs region information corresponding to the results of specifying. A region processing unit 5001 processes input images for each of the regions specified by the region information. The present invention can be applied to image processing devices for processing images.