Python Data Analysis Cookbook

Denoising images

Noise is a common phenomenon in data and also in images. Of course, noise is undesirable, as it does not add any value to our analysis. We typically assume that noise is normally distributed around zero. We consider a pixel value to be the sum of the true value and noise (if any). We also assume that the noise values are independent, that is, the noise value of one pixel is independent of another pixel.

One simple idea is to average pixels in a small window, since we suppose the expected value of noise to be zero. This is the general idea behind blurring. We can take this idea a step further and define multiple windows around a pixel, and we can then average similar patches.

OpenCV has several denoising functions and usually we ...