Noise parameter mismatch in variance stabilization, with an application to Poisson-Gaussian noise estimation

In digital imaging, there is often a need to produce estimates of the parameters that define the chosen noise model. We investigate how the mismatch between the estimated and true parameter values affects the stabilization of variance of signal-dependent noise. As a practical application of the general theoretical considerations, we devise a novel approach for estimating Poisson–Gaussian noise parameters from a single image, combining variance-stabilization and noise estimation for additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we construct a simple algorithm implementing the devised approach. We observe that when combined with optimized rational variance-stabilizing transformations, the algorithm produces results that are competitive with those of a state-of-the-art Poisson–Gaussian estimator.