Structure Aware Image Denoising and Noise Variance Estimation

Structure aware image denoising and noise variance estimation techniques are described. In one or more implementations, structure-aware denoising is described which may take into account a structure of patches as part of the denoising operations. This may be used to select one or more reference patches for a pixel based on a structure of the patch, may be used to compute weights for patches that are to be used to denoised a pixel based on similarity of the patches, and so on. Additionally, implementations are described to estimate noise variance in an image using a map of patches of an image to identify regions having pixels having a variance that is below a threshold. The patches from the one or more regions may then be used to estimate noise variance for the image.