1. A method of automatically correcting dust artifact regions within images acquired by a system including a digital camera, comprising: (a) digitally-acquiring one or more original images with said digital camera; (b) determining probabilities that certain pixels correspond to dust artifact regions within said one or more digitally-acquired images; (c) associating the dust artifact regions with one or more extracted parameters relating to the optical system when the one or more images were acquired; (d) forming a statistical dust map including mapped dust regions based on the dust artifact probability determining and associating; (e) correcting pixels corresponding to dust artifact regions within each of said one or more original images based on the associated statistical dust map.