  Photon-limited imaging arises when the number of photons collected by a
sensor array is small relative to the number of detector elements. Photon
limitations are an important concern for many applications such as spectral
imaging, night vision, nuclear medicine, and astronomy. Typically a Poisson
distribution is used to model these observations, and the inherent
heteroscedasticity of the data combined with standard noise removal methods
yields significant artifacts. This paper introduces a novel denoising algorithm
for photon-limited images which combines elements of dictionary learning and
sparse patch-based representations of images. The method employs both an
adaptation of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for Poisson noise and recently
developed sparsity-regularized convex optimization algorithms for
photon-limited images. A comprehensive empirical evaluation of the proposed
method helps characterize the performance of this approach relative to other
state-of-the-art denoising methods. The results reveal that, despite its
conceptual simplicity, Poisson PCA-based denoising appears to be highly
competitive in very low light regimes.
