2010 Second International Conference on Information Technology and Computer Science
A Median Filter Method for Image Noise
Variance Estimation
Zhijun Pei, Qingqiao Tong, Lina Wang, Jun Zhang
School of Electronic Engineering
Tianjin University of Technology and Education
Tianjin, China
peizj@tute.edu.cn
Abstract—Image noise estimation is of crucial importance for the
computer vision algorithm, for the algorithm parameter is always
adjusted to account for the variations in noise level over the
captured images. A median filter method is provided for the
image noise variance estimation in the paper. The image was first
processed with a group of high pass digital filters constructed by
several finite difference operators with different orders. For each
filtered image data, a variance was estimated. And the noise
variance is approximated by the median of those estimated
variances. In order to avoid outlier issues when there are left
image details in the residue, variances are estimated from each
filtered image data for several different inter-quartile ranges,
then a median is taken. The supposed median filter approach to
image noise estimation is simple and effective, which has been
verified by the experiments.
Keywords- median filter; noise estimation; difference operator;
inter-quartile range; computer vision
I. INTRODUCTION
The computer vision has found a wide set of applications.
However, many computer vision algorithms can work well
only if the parameters of the algorithm are hand-tweaked to
account for characteristics of the particular captured images.
One of the most common needs for algorithm parameter
adjustment is to account for variations in noise level over the
input captured images. So in order to work well, many
computer vision algorithms assume that the noise level is
known a priori, and the algorithm are adjusted according to the
noise level of the captured image instead of using fixed
parameters. To make the assumption come true, noise
estimation becomes an important research topic [1]-[3]. And an
essential step toward achieving reliable, automatic computer
vision algorithms is the ability to accurately estimate the noise
level of images. Examples of computer vision algorithms
requiring noise level estimates include motion estimation,
denoising, super-resolution, shape-from-shading and feature
extraction [4].
Noise can be estimated from multiple images or a single
image. Estimation from multiple images is an over-constrained
problem [5]. Estimation from a single image, however, is an
under-constrained problem and further assumptions have to be
made for the noise. Olsen gave a complete description and
comparison of six earlier estimation algorithms [6]. They are
classified into two different approaches: filter-based (or
smoothing-based) and block-based. In filter-based methods, the
This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin
under Grant No.09JCYBJC27300.
978-0-7695-4074-0/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ITCS.2010.11
noisy image is first filtered by a low-pass filter to suppress the
image structures. Then the noise variance is computed from the
difference between the noisy image and the filtered image. The
main difficulty of filter-based methods is that the difference
image is assumed to be the noise but this assumption is not true
for images with structures or details. In blocked-based methods,
images are tessellated into a number of blocks. The noise
variance is then computed from a set of homogeneous blocks.
The main issue of block-based methods is how to identify the
homogeneous blocks.
There were other different approaches proposed for noise
estimation [7]. Basically they are still filter-based, block-based,
or the combination of both. Filter based methods are found to
perform well for high noise levels but they usually require a
high computational load. Block based methods are in general
less complex, but they tend to overestimate when noise levels
are low.
In this paper, based on finite difference operators,
combined with inter-quartile ranges, a median filter method is
applied into the image noise variance estimation, which is
simple and robust for computer applications.
II. IMAGE NOISE
In general, images acquired by digital imaging systems are
corrupted by a number of noise sources such as photon shot
noise, dark current noise, readout noise, and quantization noise.
While some noise sources can be effectively suppressed such
as dark current noise by chip cooling and quantization noise by
using an analogue to digital converter with more bits, other
noise sources are not. The signal dependent photon noise, for
example, is unavoidable due to the quantum nature of light.
Read out noise increases proportionally with readout rate,
which cannot be lowered in high-speed systems. Although all
noise sources possess different characteristics, the total effect
of them under normal lighting conditions , i.e. not low light as
in computer vision applications, is usually modelled by a zero-
mean additive Gaussian noise distribution. It is the variance of
this additive Gaussian noise that characterizes the effect.
The only true measurement of image noise is to acquire the
same image twice and subtract the two images from each other.
The remaining signal, average value or standard deviation, is
the actual image noise. However, it is not always possible to
acquire the same measurement twice, for the time sensitive
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acquisitions cannot be repeated to derive the image noise. In
these cases, image noise can be estimated with various methods.
There is a large literature on image denoising. Although
very promising denoising results have been achieved using a
variety of methods, such as wavelets, anisotropic diffusion and
bilateral filtering, the noise level is often assumed known and
constant for varying brightness values. And in the image
denoising literature, noise is often assumed to be additive white
Gaussian noise. In contrast, the literature on noise estimation is
very limited. Noise can be estimated within an image, intra-
image estimation, or between two or more successive images,
inter-image estimation. Inter-image estimation requires more
memory and is, in general, more computationally demanding.
Intra-image noise estimation methods can be classified as
smoothing based, also called filter based, or block based. In
smoothing-based methods the image is first smoothed, for
example using an averaging filter, and then the difference
between the noisy and enhanced image is assumed to be the
noise; noise is then estimated at each pixel where the gradient
is smaller than a given threshold. In block-based methods, the
variance over a set of blocks of the image is calculated and the
average of the smallest variances is taken as an estimate.
Many noise estimation methods have difficulties estimating
noise in highly noisy images and in textured images. No
techniques were found to perform best for various noise levels
and images. Some methods use thresholds, for example, to
decide whether an edge is given at a particular image position.
Smoothing-based methods were found to perform well with
high-noise levels but they require large computations and fine
tuning for various images. Smoothing based methods have
difficulties in images with fine texture and they tend to
overestimate the noise variance. Block-based methods are, in
general, less complex than smoothing-based methods. They
tend, in general, to overestimate the noise in good quality
images and underestimate it in highly noisy images. In some
cases, no estimate is even possible.
Given that a variable X comes from a known distribution, it
is possible to estimate its variance directly from N observed
measurements x1, x2…xN. For example, the sample variance s2
of a normally distributed random variable X ~ N (u , V ) is
2 a single image seems like an impossible task. We need to
often estimated by the Mean Squared Error with respect to the
sample mean x :
1
s2
N 1
¦ ( xi  x )
1
x ˜ ¦ xi
N with a group of finite difference operator respectively and
The Equation provides an optimal estimate of the expected
value u and its variance in a least squares sense. However, a
least squares estimate is also notorious for being unreliable in
the presence of outliers. A single outlier sample could bias the
sample mean towards that value and significantly increase the
sample variance.
To reduce the influence of outliers, the sample variance can
be estimated by fitting a known distribution model to the
largest peak in the histogram of the available samples [8]. This
histogram based method is not limited to a single distribution,
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such as the Gaussian distribution, and can be applied to the
case of single frame and two-frame noise estimation. Similarly,
image noise is estimated from homogeneous regions in an
image or from difference of images after alignment. Different
from the above conventional methods, however, this estimate
of the noise variance is not computed from the sum of squared
differences, but from a Gaussian curve fit to the histogram of
the difference image. Although this curve fit allows robust
variance estimation under the presence of intensity or motion
outliers, the method is computation complex.
In order to overcome the influence of the outliers on the
noise estimation, based on difference operators, combined with
inter-quartile ranges, a median filter method is applied into the
image noise variance estimation.
III. MEDIAN FILTER METHOD FOR NOISE ESTIMATION
The median filter is the best known as order statistics filter.
For the image processing, the median filter, which, as its name
implies, replaces the value of a pixel by the median of the gray
levels in the neighbourhood of that pixel.

f ( x, y ) median{g ( s, t )}
( s , t )S x , y
The original value of the pixel is included in the
computation of the median. Median filters are quite popular
because, for certain types of random noise, they provided
excellent noise reduction capabilities, with considerably less
blurring than linear smooth filters of similar size. Median
filters are particularly effective in the presence of both bipolar
and unipolar impulse noise, also called salt and pepper noise
because of its appearance as white and black dots
superimposed on an image.
The outliers in the noise estimation can be considered as
impulse noise, so median filter method can be applied into the
noise estimation. Here, the median filter is used to avoid the
influence of the outlier on the estimation, rather than to
suppress the image noise.
In most computer vision applications, noise need to be
estimated from a single image. Estimating the noise level from
recognize whether local image variations are due to colour,
texture, or lighting variations from the image itself, or due to
the noise. It might seem that accurate estimation of the noise
level would require a very sophisticated prior model for images.
However, in this work we use a very simple median filter
method, based on a set of difference operator, to derive a bound
on the image noise level. We first processed the image data
estimate the noise using median filter method, combined with
inter-quartile ranges, from the resulted different residuals.
In the conventional filter-based methods, the noisy image is
first filtered by a low-pass filter to suppress the image
structures. Then the noise variance is computed from the
difference between the noisy image and the filtered image. The
main difficulty of filter-based methods is that the difference
image is assumed to be the noise but this assumption is not true
for images with structures or details. The processing operation
of low pass filter and difference computation can be replaced
by the finite difference operation, such as Laplacian operator.
To exclude structures or details from contributing to the noise
variance estimation, a simple edge detection algorithm using
first order gradients can be applied, however which needs
appropriate threshold to decide whether an edge is given at a
particular image position. The finite difference operator is a
high pass filer essentially in frequency domain sense. So for a
given input image, there possibly exists an appropriate finite
difference operator to estimate correctly the noise variance in
the image. But the difference operator is unknown and not easy
to choose. If the chosen difference operator is not appropriate
for the image noise variance estimation, the estimated result
may deviate from the reality value randomly, higher or lower,
because of the influence of the outliers, or the residual image
structures. In the other hand, if a set of finite difference
operators with different frequency characteristics is used
separately for the pre-processing, for some finite difference
operators, the estimate noise variance may larger than the
expected value, and for other finite difference operators, the
estimated noise variance may less than the expected value.
Because the resulted deviation from the expected noise
variance is randomly, just like impulse noise, median can
considered as the final estimation of the noise variance
according to the median filter method.
We assume that the image is corrupted by additive, zero
mean white Gaussian noise with unknown deviation, and the
model is given by
I n (x, y) = I (x, y) + n(x, y)
Where, x and y are the vertical and horizontal coordinates
of a pixel, In(x, y), I(x, y) and n(x, y) are the noisy image, the
original image and the additive Gaussian noise respectively.
Our goal is to estimate the standard deviation of the noise from
the noisy image. To exclude the image structures, the image is
first processed with different order of finite difference
operators, fdi.
g i ( x, y ) I n ( x, y )
fd i being equal to the difference between the third and first
Here, these finite difference operators with different order
can construct a group of high pass filters with different
frequency characteristic. For example, one order difference
along the row and column can expressed as
I x (m, n) I (m, n  1)  I (m, n)
I y (m, n) I (m  1, n)  I (m, n)
So one order difference operator can be expressed as fd1 =
[1 -1]. Similarly, more high order of finite difference operators
can be expressed: fd2 = [1 -2 1]; fd3 = [1 -3 3 -1]; fd4 = [1 -4 6
-4 1]; fd5 = [1 -5 10 -10 5 -1]; fd6 = [1 -6 15 -20 15 -6 1].
The frequency characteristics of the set of finite operators
are shown in Fig.1. Apparently, these finite difference
operators have high pass feature in frequency domain but with
different cut-off frequency. From the processed image gi, the
noise variance V i can be estimated, and the estimated image
2
noise variance is approximated by the median filter method:
Vˆ 2 median{V i2 }
Here, how to estimate the noise variance V i from the
2
image gi should be pay more attention. For given finite
15
difference operator fdi, there exists outliers in the filtered image
gi, which have a significantly influence on the estimated result.
To overcome the influence of the outliers on the estimation
result, combined with inter-quartile ranges, the median method
can be used to the estimation of noise variance.
Figure 1 Frequency domain characteristics of finite difference operators
In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically
distant from the rest of the data. Deletion of outlier data is a
controversial practice frowned on by many scientists and
science instructors. While mathematical criteria provide an
objective and quantitative method for data rejection, they do
not make the practice more scientifically or methodologically
sound, especially in small sets or where a normal distribution
cannot be assumed. Rejection of outliers is more acceptable in
areas of practice where the underlying model of the process
being measured and the usual distribution of measurement
error are confidently known.
Estimators capable of coping with outliers are said to be
robust. And the median is a robust statistic. Like the median,
the inter-quartile range, IQR, is insensitive to outliers. In
statistics, the inter-quartile range (IQR), also called the mid-
spread or middle fifty, is a measure of statistical dispersion,
quartiles.Unlike the total range, the inter-quartile range is a
robust statistic, having a breakdown point of 25%, and is thus
often preferred to the total range. We can try to back out the
noise variance. To compute an inter-quartile range, like the
distance between the 25% and 75% points. This trims off the
trash at each end, potentially corrupted if there are image
structures in the image gi. For a normal distribution, where
IQR | 1.349V
To avoid outlier issues when there are left image details in
the residue, actually do this for several different inter-quartile
ranges, and then take a median.
IV. EXPERIMENT AND DISCUSSION
To illustrate that the provided median filter method for
image noise estimation, we apply our noise inference to several
different applications images. The resulting method, properly
accounting for image noise, show robust behavior over a wide
range of noise conditions.
In experiments, different application fields of images are
considered as the ideal object images. And Gaussian noise with
zero mean and different variance were added to these object
images, as shown in Fig. 2. where (a) is cameraman image, 8
bit, the size of 256 × 256 pixels; (b) is lily image, 8 bit,
186×230 pixels; (c) is westcordorthophoto image, 8 bit,
366×364.
(a ) cameraman (b) lily (c) westcordorthophoto
Figure 2 Noisy images
First, consider the cameraman image as the test image. The
sample image is preprocessed by the finite different operator
separately. For each finite difference operator, the image is
convolved along each rows of the test image, then along each
column of the intermediate result. The resulted images are
shown in Fig. 3. Apparently, for more high order finite
difference operator, more less image details are left in the
resulted image, due to more high cutoff frequency. To
overcome the influence of the outliers on the noise variance
estimation, median filter method combined with inter-quartile
ranges is used to the estimation, just as discussed above.
(1) fd1 (2) fd2 (3) fd3
(4) fd4 (5) fd5 (6) fd6
Figure 3 Resulted images with finite difference operator
For the tested images, the results of the noise variance
estimation are show in table 1. In the table the estimated result
for the case when the added noise variance is zero is also given,
because there may exists some noise in the ideal object images,
more or less, which should be subtracted from the estimated
results when consider the estimation error. The estimated
results show that when the noise level is high the difference
between true variance and estimated value is large due to low
ration of signal to noise. In contrast, when the added noise level
is middle level or low level, the estimated is more accurate. In
practical computer vision applications, the noise level in the
captured image is always less than the middle noise level case,
so the provide method can be used to the noise estimation for
the computer vision applications.
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TABLE 1 IMAGE NOISE VARIANCE ESTIMATION
Added V21 0.1 0.05 0.01 0.005 0.001 0.
(a) V̂ 0.1935 0.0674
2
0.0394 0.0097 0.0052 0.0014 9.59e-5
(b) V̂ 0.1919 0.0648
2
0.0384 0.0103 0.0056 0.0016 2.7e-4
(c) V̂ 0.2011 0.0726
2
0.0432 0.0118 0.0069 0.0027 0.0015
V. CONCLUSIONS
We present a simple and robust algorithm for image noise
estimation. The input captured image is assumed to be
corrupted by additive zero mean Gaussian noise. To exclude
structures or details from contributing to the noise variance
estimation, a set of finite difference operator is applied first.
Then a median filter method provides very accurate noise
variance estimation when the noise level is not high. There is
no parameter needed to adaptive to the image contents.
Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs
well for different types of images over a large range of noise
variances. The proposed noise estimation method is simple
and robust. It only required convolutions and median. The
proposed method of image noise estimation can be used to the
computer vision applications, and also can be extended to
other image processing applications. In the other hand, when
the noise level is high, the estimation of the supposed
approach is not accurate, which should be improved in the
future work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is also partially supported by Research Start
Foundation of Tianjin University of Technology and Education
under Grant No. KYQD08015.
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