Category: Noise

Easy 2D Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) calculation for images to find stars without extracting the background noise (C++)

/ Carsten / 7 Comments

Calculation of a SNR for stars

This article shows how to calculate the 2D signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Furthermore, it demonstrates how the $SNR$ can be used to decide if there is a potential star in the image.

Long story short – I was looking for a way to detect more or less reliably if a user selected a region which contains a star. I wanted to be able to clearly distinguish between the following two images:

both stars SNR

Solution with the CImg library

After a long journey I finally ended up with the following solution. It is based on the CImg library which in a way calculates the Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR):

CImg <uint16_t> image;
...
double q = image.variance(0) / image.variance_noise(0);
double qClip = (q > 1 ? q : 1);
double snr = std::sqrt(qClip - 1);

For the two images above the code gives the following results:

~/snr$ ./snr no_star.fits 
SNR: 0.0622817
~snr$ ./snr test_star.fits
SNR: 1.5373

For many people this is where the journey ends. But for some of you it may just begin :). Follow me into the rabbit hole and find out why the solution shown above actually works…

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Night sky image processing – Part 1: Noise reduction using anisotropic diffusion with C++

/ Carsten / 1 Comment
effect of anisotropic diffusion
The effect of anisotropic diffusion on astro-images

For some time now I am looking into the field of night sky image processing. It is a huge topic and there are already a lot of different approaches and solutions to many of the existing problems. I have collected many star images over the time. To me it is very interesting to try different algorithms with my own data. This article starts with a problem every night sky photographer and astronomer is aware of: noise. I did some research and came across “anisotropic diffusion”.

What is anisotropic diffusion?

In short, anisotropic diffusion is a non-linear and space-variant transformation i.e. the transformation depends on the image content. The effect is that the resulting images preserve linear structures while at the same time smoothing is made along these structures. Additional information on anisotropic diffusion is available for example on wikipedia and here. Furthermore I found this youtube explanation quite helpful.

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