Conventional noise reduction filtering schemes realize limited improvements of the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) in the low-level noisy images. The flatness degree and the edge information are effectively used to estimate the noise volume. We propose a noise estimator for reducing noise in the AWGN (additive white gaussian noise) corrupted images using three intermediate image maps (FGM(flatness gray map), FIM(flatness index map), NEM(noise estimate map)). The proposed noise estimator is fed into the conventional noise reduction filters as a pre-processor. The performance of noise reduction is tested in the various AWGN corrupted images.