Automatic noise estimation in images using local statistics. Additive and multiplicative cases

In this paper, we focus on the problem of automatic noise parameter estimation for additive and multiplicative models and propose a simple and novel method to this end. Specifically we show that if the image to work with has a sufficiently great amount of low-variability areas (which turns out to be a typical feature in most images), the variance of noise (if additive) can be estimated as the mode of the distribution of local variances in the image and the coefficient of variation of noise (if multiplicative) can be estimated as the mode of the distribution of local estimates of the coefficient of variation. Additionally, a model for the sample variance distribution for an image plus noise is proposed and studied. Experiments show the goodness of the proposed method, specially in recursive or iterative filtering methods. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.