Noise estimation for video processing based on spatio-temporal gradients

We propose an efficient and accurate wavelet-based noise estimation method for white Gaussian noise in video sequences. The proposed method analyzes the distribution of spatial and temporal gradients in the video sequence in order to estimate the noise variance. The estimate is derived from the most frequent gradient in the two distributions and is compensated for the errors due to the spatio-temporal image sequence content, by a novel correction function. The spatial and temporal gradients are determined from the finest scale of the spatial and temporal wavelet transform, respectively. The main application of the noise estimation algorithm is in wavelet-based video processing. The results show that the proposed method is more accurate than other state-of-the-art noise estimation techniques and less sensitive to varying spatio-temporal content and noise level.