Coded exposure photography makes the ill-pose motion deblurring problem well-posed, and searching for the optimal code has been the key problem in coded exposure photography. For practical purpose, an optimal code searching method for coded exposure photography in the presence of CCD sensor noise is proposed. Firstly, the sensor noise in the process of imaging was systemically analyzed based on the affine noise model. Then, the basis of Raskar’s code was theoretically analyzed for the first time and based on the signal to noise ratio (SNR) gain of deblurred image, an analytic formulas between the photon noise and the structure of the optimal code was presented. Finally, based on the noise calibration of real coded exposure camera, the criteria for the optimal code was presented, a fitness function was designed and the optimal code using the genetic algorithm was obtained. Experimental results with synthetic and real data demonstrates the validity of the proposed method.