US Patent 7592936 Input distribution determination for denoising

A denoising process or system uses convex optimization to determine characteristics of a clean signal. In one embodiment, a noisy signal that represents a set of symbols can be scanned to determine an empirical vector with components respectively indicating respective empirical probabilities of symbols in the noisy signal that occur in a particular context. A convex optimization process can then identify a vector such that a difference between the empirical vector and a product of the identified vector and a channel matrix is minimized. The identified vector can be used to determine when a symbol in the noisy signal should be replaced when assembling a reconstructed signal.