The bilateral filter (BF) is an important image denoising local filter. It reduces noise in images while preserving edges by means of nonlinear combination of local pixel values. Its formulation and implementation are both simple. However, the BF is not parameter-free. The set of the bilateral filter parameters has an important influence on its behavior and performance. They have to be chosen considering the end application. In the case of noise removal, the parameters have to be adapted to the noise level, while the bilateral filter adapts itself to the image details content. In this paper we propose a method to estimate the best bilateral filter intensity parameter set in the case of shot noise removal, the dominant form of natural noise in digital imaging.