Noise refers to a lot of things in the engineering world that are are tangentially related. We use the term to generally refer to random deviations in expected outcomes due to natural or chaotic phenomenon. This includes things like random fluctuations on an electrical wire, aberrations on film grain and things of that nature.
In this blog, however, we are usually referring to what’s known as a noise texture. This is simply an image, often black and white, with random colors in each pixel.
Caption
Noise Texture
For those of you who grew up whacking a TV for a better signal, this might look familiar. That’s because TV static is also a form of noise!
The goal of noise textures is to often emulate the randomness of natural phenomenon like TV static, film grain and even light scattering.