Anscombe Transform

In statistics, the Anscombe transform, named after Francis Anscombe, is a variance-stabilizing transformation that transforms a random variable with a Poisson distribution into one with an approximately standard Gaussian distribution. The Anscombe transform is widely used in photon-limited imaging (astronomy, X-ray) where images naturally follow the Poisson law. The Anscombe transform is usually used to pre-process the data in order to make the standard deviation approximately constant. Then denoising algorithms designed for the framework of additive white Gaussian noise are used; the final estimate is then obtained by applying an inverse Anscombe transformation to the denoised data.