A Technique for Evaluation of CCD Video-Camera Noise

This paper presents a technique to identify and measure the prominent sources of sensor noise in commercially available charge-coupled device (CCD) video cameras by analysis of the output images. Noise fundamentally limits the distinguishable content in an image and can significantly reduce the robustness of an image processing application. Although sources of image sensor noise are well documented, there has been little work on the development of techniques to identify and quantify the types of noise present in CCD video-camera images. A comprehensive noise model for CCD cameras was used to evaluate the technique on a commercially available CCD video camera.