QUANTILE ANALYSIS OF IMAGE SENSOR NOISE DISTRIBUTION

This paper describes a study aimed at comparing the real image sen-sor noise distribution to the models of noise often assumed in im-age denoising designs. Quantile analysis in pixel, wavelet, and vari-ance stabilization domains reveal that the tails of Poisson, signal-dependent Gaussian, and Poisson-Gaussian models are too short to capture real sensor noise behavior. Noise model mismatch would likely result in image denoising that undersmoothes real sensor data. Index Terms — image denoising, image sensor, Poisson 1