A practical SNR estimation scheme for remotely sensed optical imagery

Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) is one of the basic and commonly used statistic parameters to evaluate the imaging quality of optical sensors. A lot of SNR estimation algorithms have been developed in various research fields. However, one intrinsic fact is usually ignored that SNR is not a constant value, but a quantity changing with the incident radiance received by the sensor. So SNR values estimated on different images through commonly used method are not comparable due to their distinct intensity levels between the images. Here we proposed a normalized SNR estimation scheme which can be readily applied to remotely sensed optical images. With this scheme SNR values obtained from different images can be of comparability, thus we can easily evaluate the performance degeneration of the sensor with more sufficient reliability.