A new filter to remove salt and pepper noise in color images

Abstract

In this paper, a new method is presented for reducing salt and pepper noise in color images. This method consists of three steps: In the first step, Laplacian operators and threshold values are used to identify pixels that are likely to have been corrupted by noise; in the second step, these noise candidates are judged by using the neighborhood of each pixel. After recognizing the noisy pixels, the vector median filter is used for replacing the noisy pixels, in the third step. The proposed algorithm is tested against different color images, and it gives a better peak signal-to-noise ratio and a lower normalized mean square error. These results have also been checked and analyzed visually. The performance of the proposed method is compared with common existing vector filters at different noise densities. Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm provides better performance than many of the existing vector filters in terms of noise suppression and preserving thin lines, fine details, and image edges.