Fractals/Image noise

Image noise

• set of all pixels which are not rendered properly
• "aberrant pixels. That means pixels that are not representing the colour ... correctly. " Barry J Brady

Noise can be in different situations. Here only noise in the rendered images is incuded. So there is no original image, no photo, no signal, ...

key words

• pixel spacing

types

• in mathworks
•  snibgo's ImageMagick pages: Noise

Moire patterns

"A uniform grid is known to produce Moire patterns from the interaction of thin near-parallel lines with the regularly spaced sampling points."

aliasing

   " Our images look noisy and grainy near the boundary of the Mandelbrot set. The escape time bands get closer and closer, while the pixel spacing is fixed. The pixel grid samples isolated points of a mathematically abstract image defined on the continuous plane. The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem shows that sampling isolated points from a continuum is a valid approximation only so long as the values don’t change too quickly between the points. Aliasing occurs when the values do change too quickly compared to the sampling rate, with the grainy noisy visual effects as we have been. Because the escape time bands increase in number without bound as we approach the boundary of the Mandelbrot set, no sampling rate can be high enough." Claude Heiland-Allen

• 
  binary decomposition of level sets of exterior of Mandelbrot set
• 
  Mandelbrot set using level set method

Commonly Used Image Quality Metrics

• PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio)
• SSIM (Structural similarity)
• NIQE (Naturalness Image Quality Evaluator)

How to

detect noise

   "To detect noise you first need to know the properties of your useful data. So if you have no prior knowledge of the input images then you Can not reliably detect noise." Spektre

measure noise

• "an objective measurement for image quality based on" the structural similarity
• noise rate = number of pixels that were recognized as noise. "To differentiate normal pixels from noise, I just calculated the medium value of its neighbor pixels and if its value was bigger than some critical value, we say that this one is noise."
• " Instead of classifying a pixel as noise if it exceeds such a threshold, you could measure the "error" and compute the variance or standard deviation for all of the pixels in the image. This would help you distinguish between having n pixels just above the threshold and n pixels way out whack. It also avoids the need to select a threshold." Adrian McCarthy
• estimate the noise variance If you get sigma > 10.0, then you have a noisy image ( only for grayscale)

// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8960462/how-can-i-measure-image-noise
// noise rate by Vitalii Boiarskyi
if (ABS(1 - (currentPixel.R+currentPixel.G+currentPixel.B)/(neigborsMediumValues.R + neigboursMediumValues.G + neigboursMediumValues.B))) > criticalValue)
then
{
    currentPixelIsNoise = TRUE;
}

# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2440504/noise-estimation-noise-measurement-in-image
# J. Immerkær, “Fast Noise Variance Estimation”, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Vol. 64, No. 2, pp. 300-302, Sep. 1996


import math, 
import numpy as np 
from scipy.signal import convolve2d

def estimate_noise(I):

  H, W = I.shape # Tuple of image array dimensions.

  M = [[1, -2, 1],
       [-2, 4, -2],
       [1, -2, 1]]

  sigma = np.sum(np.sum(np.absolute(convolve2d(I, M))))
  sigma = sigma * math.sqrt(0.5 * math.pi) / (6 * (W-2) * (H-2))

  return sigma

remove noise

       "Noise reduction therefore quickly becomes an ‘AI-complete’ problem " Mark Scott Abeln 

names:

• denoising
• remove noise
• noise reduction

software

• open image denoise
• nvidia optix-denoiser

Methods

• High precision
• perturbation technique
• rebasing : rebase to new reference and carry on
• Bivariate Linear Approximation ( BLA)
• Distance Estimation
• Interior Detection: Keep track of derivatives at the critical point. When the absolute value of the derivative drops below a threshold such as 0.001

, classify it as interior and stop iterating.

precision

• increasing precision

sampling

• increasing sampling (subpixel accuracy )
• jittering the sampling points
• Poisson Disk Sampling
• in matlab

Enlargement of a 6×6 pixel raster graphic to 11×11 pixels (the low image resolutions in this example were chosen for better clarity; the principle is the same for higher resolutions).

• 1: input image; the pixels are shown here as circles.
• 2: The pixel grid of the output image, shown here as yellow crosses, is superimposed on the input image.
• 3: The color values of the output image are calculated from the nearby pixels of the input image.
• 4: Output image.

Image resampling

Image resampling reconstruction filter. Scaling using a radially symmetric reconstruction filter (carrier shown in green). A color value of the output image is calculated as a sum of color values of the input image weighted by the reconstruction filter.

When scaling using bilinear interpolation, a color value of the output image is calculated from the four closest color values of the input image.

postprocessing

• with Image Magic

mask

• mask the grainy noise from aliasing ( fading-out)

dither

Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise used to randomize quantization error, preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding in images.

dither to more accurately display graphics containing a greater range of colors than the display hardware is capable of showing:

• The limited precision of 8bit (s)RGB means visible banding can occur, particularly in darker areas with smooth gradients. Adding dither trades off spatial resolution vs colour resolution, spreading the quantisation errors around so the end result is more perceptually uniform.

It is simply and ease of implementation

BLA

The iterations can be approximated by bivariate linear function( A linear function with with two variables is called a bivariate linear function):

$z_{n+l}=A_{n,l}z_{n}+B_{n,l}c$ 

For Mandelbrot set

${\begin{aligned}A_{m,1}&={\frac {\partial Z_{m+1}}{\partial Z_{m}}}=2Z_{m}\\B_{m,1}&={\frac {\partial Z_{m+1}}{\partial C}}=1\\\end{aligned}}$

For Mandelbrot set this is valid when: "non-linear part of the full perturbation iterations is so small that omitting it would cause fewer problems than the rounding error of the low precision data type"

$|z_{n}^{2}|<<|2Z_{n}z_{n}+c|$ 

BLA can be used for

• acceleration
• avoiding glitches

Variants:

• steps
  • Single Step BLA
  • Multiple step BLA
• Non-Conformal BLA
• ABS Variation BLA
• Hybrid BLA
• Multiple Critical Points

Examples

glitches

glitches

• Incorrect parts of renders using perturbation techique
• pixel which dynamics differ significantly from the dynamics of the reference pixel
• pixel which is unevaluated ( unknown pixel) or glitched or otherwise bad

Types of glitches:

• noisy = isolated pixels
• solid = The largest connected component of the set of such pixels

See also:

• Glitches in perturbation method

Code

• Efficient computational noise in GLSL by Ian McEwan, David Sheets, Stefan Gustavson, Mark Richardson
• aizvorski: video-quality

See also

• image quality
• jagged and pixelated edges, colloquially known as "jaggies" ( see antialiasing)
• Jitter is an
  • Jittered grid in supresampling = "random displacements of the center of the pixel withing the square of the actual pixel" ( Gerrit)
  • variation of a periodic item

Supersampling - Jittering

• commons categorise
  • Noise
  • Image noise
• procedural noise
  • State of the Art in Procedural Noise Functions by A. Lagae, S. Lefebvre, R. Cook, T. DeRose, G. Drettakis, D.S. Ebert, J.P. Lewis K. Perlin7 M. Zwicker8
  • pseudo-random noise in image graphic
• band limiting is a good solution for noisy functions ( Inigo Quilez)