Patent 7813586 was granted and assigned to Mela Sciences, Inc. on October, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A target digital image is received from an image sensor. The image is contaminated by noise of unknown magnitude that is represented by a reference digital image. A process is applied that uses statistical analysis of the target digital image and of the reference digital image to estimate a magnitude of the noise for at least some pixels of the target digital image.