Patent ID: 7062108

Claim:
A method for estimating the noise appearance in an image, comprising the steps of: a) forming an output noise table representing noise magnitude vs. intensity of the image; and b) generating a scalar noise metric from the output noise table, said noise metric having a value representing the noise appearance in the image as seen by a human observer; wherein the step of forming an output noise table includes the steps of: a1) forming an input noise table representing noise magnitude vs. intensity of an input image; a2) providing an image processing chain including one or more image transforms; a3) determining an appropriate noise transform defining the effect that each image transform will have on the noise in the image; and a4) applying the one or more noise transforms to the input noise table to produce the output noise table representing an estimate of the noise in the image wherein the step of generating a noise metric includes the step of using the peak value of the noise table to obtain the noise metric.