Patent ID: 7889943

Claim:
A method for characterizing noise in an image comprising: loading a digital image stored in a computer readable medium; selecting plurality of regions of the image to analyze; generating a set of subbands of the image for each color channel, wherein generating a set of subbands further comprises applying a wavelet transform to the image data for the one or more regions to generate one or more sets of subband coefficients; analyzing image data for the regions, wherein analyzing image data for the one or more regions further comprises: determining based on the one or more sets of subband coefficients a set of dispersion values that comprise a plurality of dispersion values for each subband of each color channel, wherein each dispersion value corresponds to a selected region, subband and color channel; determining based on the set of dispersion values a set of decay pattern values indicating how noise decays from higher to lower level subbands, wherein determining the set of decay pattern values comprises dividing a first dispersion value corresponding to a first region, first color channel and first wavelet level by a second dispersion value corresponding to the first region, the first color channel and a second wavelet level to determine a first normalized dispersion value; generating a noise profile for the image using the dispersion values, wherein the noise profile correlates noise in a color channel to color, luminance and frequency band; storing the noise profile in a computer readable memory.