What Is Denoising?

Anyone who's taken a photo with a digital camera is likely familiar with a "noisy" image: discolored spots that make the photo lose clarity and sharpness. Many photographers have tips and tricks to reduce noise in images, including fixing the settings on the camera lens or taking photos in different lighting. But it isn't just photographs that can look discolored -- noise is common in computer graphics, too. Noise refers to the random variations of brightness and color that aren't part of the original image. Removing noise from imagery -- which is becoming more common in the field of image processing and computer vision -- is known as denoising.