Recent advancements in the field of camera technologies and consumer electronic (CE) devices are largely due to rapid technological developments in image-processing techniques. Due to recent advancements in the field of camera technologies, cameras of today enable users to capture images at low light conditions. An image captured at a low-light condition may comprise one or more regions with slow varying color or luminosity. In cases where the captured image is riddled with noisy patches, a conventional image-processing apparatus may de-noise the captured image. In such cases, the conventional image-processing apparatus may introduce certain undesired artifacts called staircase artifacts into the one or more regions.
Staircase artifacts are common artifacts which may be observed in many de-noising tasks, such as one-dimensional signal de-noising, two-dimensional image de-noising, and video de-noising. Existing image de-noising technologies may flatten one or more regions of an image signal, and thereby create staircase artifacts in the image signal. Consequently, the staircase artifacts may manifest in the one or more regions of the image signal, as undesired false steps or undesired flat regions in an otherwise smoothly varying image signal. In the captured image, the staircase artifacts may manifest as undesired discrepancies such as a presence of staircase like lines or boundaries, a loss of detail, and contouring.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of described systems with some aspects of the present disclosure, as set forth in the remainder of the present application and with reference to the drawings.