Patent US 6,415,063

A technique is disclosed for identifying potentially defective circuitry associated with discrete pixel regions in an imaging system detector. Signals representative of the pixels in an image matrix are generated. The signals are analyzed to identify mean and standard deviation values from a histogram of the pixel population. Pixels lying outside of a desired range, such as a distribution envelope determined from the histogram, are compared to the mean value plus or minus a multiple of the standard deviation. Pixels lying outside of the desired range are labeled or masked as potentially defective.