A shading correction circuit of the present invention includes an image
pickup device having photo detectors arranged on its receptive surface,
and a shading correction part for performing shading correction on an
output signal of the image pickup device. The image pickup device has an
effective pixel area and an upper optical black part. The shading
correction part has a correction coefficient generating part and a
correction processing part. The correction coefficient generating part
thereof extracts shading variation according to an output of the upper
optical black part, and generates a correction coefficient for the
shading variation. The correction processing part thereof performs
shading correction on an image signal by using the correction coefficient
generated by the correction coefficient generating part.