Denoising photographs using dark frames optimized by quadratic programming

Photographs taken with long exposure or high ISO setting may contain substantial amounts of noise, drastically reducing the Signal-To-Noise Ratio (SNR). This paper presents a novel optimization approach for denoising. It is based on a library of dark frames previously taken under varying conditions of temperature, ISO setting and exposure time, and a quality measure or prior for the class of images to denoise. The method automatically computes a synthetic dark frame that, when subtracted from an image, optimizes the quality measure. For specific choices of the quality measure, the denoising problem reduces to a quadratic programming (QP) problem that can be solved efficiently. We show experimentally that it is sufficient to consider a limited subsample of pixels when evaluating the quality measure in the optimization, in which case the complexity of the procedure does not depend on the size of the images but only on the number of dark frames. We provide quantitative experimental results showing that our method automatically computes dark frames that are competitive with those taken under idealized conditions (controlled temperature, ISO setting, exposure time, and averaging of multiple exposures). We provide application examples in astronomical image denoising. The method is validated on two CMOS SLRs.