Patent attributes
An image processing apparatus for recovering reading faults produced in time of scanning photographic film due to imperfections present on the film such as scratches, dust or stains. The apparatus comprises a defective pixel detecting unit (11) for detecting defective pixels influenced by the imperfections, an interpolating unit (12) for performing an interpolating process for the defective pixels to create corrected pixel values for the defective pixels, a standard deviation calculating unit (13) for calculating standard deviations of pixel values forming image data, and determining granularity of an input image based on the standard deviations, and a graininess adding unit (14) for adding a value obtained by multiplying the granularity by a random number to the corrected pixel values for each defective pixel.