Local denoising applied to RAW images may outperform non-local patch-based methods applied to the camera output

Abstract

State-of-the-art denoising methods achieve impressive results, even for large noise levels. However, they can not be implemented in camera hardware, mainly due to the fact that they are computationally too intensive. The aim of this paper is then to show that we can obtain comparable denoising results to the ones obtained with state-of-art methods by inserting a well-chosen fast denoising method at the right location in the camera processing pipeline. We evaluate our results visually and with respect to objective measures.