Two consecutive interlaced video pictures of the same polarity or two consecutive progressive video pictures are read by a video processing system. The video pictures may comprise a current picture and a noise reduced reference picture. Motion and/or motion vectors may be estimated between the current and reference pictures by a motion compensated noise detector and/or a motion compensated temporal filter. A noise level sample may be determined for a pixel in the current picture based on a window of pixel data from the current picture and a window of motion compensated pixel data from the reference picture. One or more of a moving edge gradient value, a moving content value and a determined range of noise level values may be utilized to determine a valid noise sample. Noise level samples may be accumulated and a noise level may be determined for the current picture.