What will be the standard high ISO levels 6 to 8 years from now?

[jrista]

Take a look at one paper that covers extremely clean banding noise removal with wavelet deconvolution:

http://lib.semi.ac.cn:8080/tsh/dzzy/wsqk/spie/vol6623/662316.pdf

I've never seen any denoise tool that could deband that well.

I will check out the link, but I am very sceptical about any paper showing amazing image processing results. It turns out that it is a lot easier to tailor an algorithm (using tons of manual labour) for a specific set of images/noise-profiles, than to design a more general algorithm. Think of how amazing results a gifted Photoshop-girl can achieve after multiple hours cleaning up one image.

I am not sure how wavelet deconvolution might compare to a filterbank (which I assume you are referring to analog filterbanks for, say, audio processing),

I was thinking about digital filterbanks, but the principle is the same. All linear transforms essentially consists of multiply and add operations. 

So, wavelet denoise algorithms may not sound super cool like a filter bank or FFT (although FFT's are used in the article above to produce waveforms), but people do seem to be doing super cool things with them.

I think it is the other way around: wavelets sounds supercool, but really are highly related to digital filterbanks, FFTs/DCTs etc.

If you want to do really amazing stuff, I think you need to do non-linear signal processing. Problem is, no-one seems to really understand it :-)

-h

Hmm, odd that people don't understand non-linear signal processing. I mean, any polynomial would be a non-linear function. I think maybe the trick is figuring out how to apply non-linear functions in a useful way...linear is easy. Non-linear can take on an infinite variety of forms, continuous or non-continuous, etc. I think its just that non-linear processing is more complex and requires more effort to effectively apply.

[Dark Reality]

All this tech info is beyond me, but it sounds like many people are saying, "it's as good as it's going to get basically." But that has been said countless times in history. Someone will figure out a way to fix current problems or work around them, and I certainly think that we will be seeing major improvements in iso. Maybe a stop better per year until people just don't need it.

[Trovador]

In 6 to 8 years you won't even need to take the lens cap off!

[bdunbar79]

In 6 to 8 years you won't even need to take the lens cap off!

Unless there's a light leak issue  .