Estimation of CCD/CMOS sensor noise I would like to know what is the basic procedure to estimate the noise level of a CCD/CMOS sensor from an image/sequence of images acquired. I am going to use MATLAB to perform this operation.

What I did is I acquired a certain number of images with the shutter on, so the images are basically black images. The cameras I tested so far are all colour cameras, so there's a Bayer filter in front of the sensors. I have three channels R,G,B in the image output.

I was thinking that I can compute the average pixel value and the two-dimensional RMS to have an estimation of the noise. But I don't know if this is the recommended approach.

In addition, I guess that the noise estimation with the shutter on does not relate much with the noise level with the shutter on.

What do you think, do you think that the lens aperture also plays a significan role?
Instead of capturing with shutter on, I suggest you to capture a picture in low-light and set your exposure time as minimum as possible and the reduce the aperture. Capture a neutral surface(where R,G,B are equal,preferably neutral gray) so when averaging the entire frame you will know noise level change by particular color.Do your calculations on Bayer RAW instead of jpeg because RAW is directly from sensor without any extra processing.


  Do you think lens aperture will play a significant role?


Yes.Lens aperture will play a significant role. If you are reducing the aperture it means the amount of light reaching the sensor is less and it has to be compensated by either increasing exposure time or the gain(Increasing the gain increases the noise).