according to some criteria the block enclosed by the bounding pixels is masked or otherwise ignored in further processing the non bounding or internal pixels are not tested thereby increasing the speed of the process this way speckles or noise that do not lie in a region of interest are quickly eliminated from further processing the kernel is then moved to a location that does not overlap with the previous location step 750 this way a new set of pixels from the image is considered for noise reduction steps 720 and 730 are then repeated for the new location of the kernel if the test criteria is not met for a given position of the kernel operations include moving the kernel to a location that overlaps with the previous location in some way step 740 b continuing with the example of skin tone detection if skin tone is detected in bounding pixels for a kernel location the kernel is shifted over to the next pixel position e g moved horizontally by one pixel and or vertically by one pixel in some implementations when an entire row meets the criteria whereas other bounding pixels do not the kernel may be shifted down to the next row steps 720 and 730 are repeated for the new position of the kernel the kernel is thus moved over the image to perform quick noise reduction as described above in some implementations multiple passes may be used to improve the quality of filtering for example boundaries.