A detector imaging system having an apparatus and method for correcting defective pixels in an acquired image is disclosed herein. The system includes a correction scheme including temporarily replacing a defective pixel with a linear interpolation of the defective pixel's surrounding neighboring pixel values, determining a local gradient based in part on the acquired image and a gradient kernel, and providing a correction value based on the local gradient to correct the defective pixel. The correction scheme is repeated a plurality of times as desired to correct all the defective pixels in the acquired image.