The main scope of this paper is to show how tools from quantum mechanics, in particular the Schroedinger equation, can be used to construct an adaptive transform suitable for signal and image processing applications. The proposed dictionary is obtained by considering the signal or image as a discrete potential in Schroedinger equation, further used to construct the Hamiltonien operator. In order to illustrate its practical interest in signal and image processing, we provide denoising results in the case of signal-dependent noise, which is the noise type the most adapted to the proposed approach.