Almost lossless compression of noisy images

Abstract An almost lossless compression method for images is introduced adapted to the temporal noise of image sensors. In a first step, a non-linear gray value transform is applied to generate an image with a gray value independent temporal noise and less bits than the original image. The chosen value for the standard deviation of the temporal noise in the transformed image determines how accurately mean values and the standard deviation of temporal noise can be computed and to which extent the image can be compressed further by a lossless compression in a second step. Just a measurement of the noise characteristics according to the open and international EMVA standard 1288, a non-linear gray value transform for noise equalization, and an open source lossless compression algorithm are required to use this new compression method.