Image restoration techniques such as noise reduction and contrast enhancement have been researched for enhancing a contaminated image by the noise. An image degraded by additive random noise can be enhanced by noise reduction. Sigma filtering is one of the most widely used method to reduce the noise. In this paper, we propose a new sigma filter algorithm based on noise variance estimation which effectively enhances the degraded image by noise. Specifically, the Bartlett test is used to measure the degree of noise with respect to the degree of image feature. Simulation results are also given to show the performance of the proposed algorithm.