Visual Noise Revision for ISO 15739

With the publication of the second edition of the ISO 15739 Standard [1] in 2013 the measurement of “visual noise” became a normative part of the standard. Over the years the algorithm has proven to be useful and reliable for the judgement of the visibility of noise in images captured by digital cameras.

Nevertheless a few aspects of the measurement procedures were questioned by some experts like e.g. the relation of the contrast sensitivity function (csf) for the luminance and the two chrominance channels. And the resulting weighting factors for the three channels also depend on the csf relation. In addition, some experts would like to use the more common CIELAB space instead of CIELUV.

For these reasons the responsible ISO technical committee 42 working group 18 is looking into a revision of the visual noise section of the standard. This paper describes the procedure the group is undertaking to solve the remaining issues in the upcoming revision.