Because television sets are often used in areas where the reception co
nditions are less than optimal, the inclusion of a noise reduction fil
ter in the receiver adds an attractive feature. A new IC1) for economy
TV 2-D spatial noise filtering has been designed and is described in
this paper. It includes a novel circuit for noise-level estimation for
optimal filtering under varying reception conditions. When cascaded w
ith commonly-available motion-adaptive temporal noise filters, a high
quality 3-D concept for high-end TV results. The average improvement i
n noise level is some 3 dB in stand-alone operation, and some 6 dB whe
n cascaded.