Measurement of Noise using the dead leaves pattern

When evaluating camera systems for their noise performance, uniform patches in the object space are used. This is required as the measurement is based on the assumption that any variation of the digital values can be considered as noise.

In presence of adaptive noise removal, this method can lead to misleading results as it is relatively easy for algorithms to smooth uniform areas of an image.

In this paper, we evaluate the possibilities to measure noise on the so called dead leaves pattern, a random pattern of circles with varying diameter and color.

As we measure the noise on a non-uniform pattern, we have a better description of the true noise performance and a potentially better correlation to the user experience.