Empirical Characterization of Camera Noise

Noise characterization is important for several image pro-cessing operations such as denoising, thresholding, and HDR. This con-tribution describes a simple procedure to estimate the noise at an imagefor a particular camera as a function of exposure parameters (shuttertime, gain) and of the irradiance at the pixel. Results are presented for aPointgrey Firefly camera and are compared with a standard theoreticalmodel of noise variance. Although the general characteristic of the noisereflects what predicted by the theoretical model, a number of discrepan-cies are found that deserve further investigation.