Webcam denoise by averaging stills

I needed to take a half decent picture and all I had was the laptop webcam. Needless to say the quality was awful. Noisy and full of artifacts.

So… What if we take a few dozen pictures and average them together?

Much much better, some details even manage to show on the processed image, like the . on the period/colon key, and all the noise is just gone. For a “side by side” comparison, here is the result as an animated PNG.

The “average of frames” picture was created using GraphicsMagick with the following command:

gm convert -average frame-* average.png

And the animated PNG with ImageMagick:

magick -delay 100 -loop 0 frame-1.png frame-2.png APNG:out.apng