A New Method for Impulse Noise Elimination and Edge Preservation

Abstract

In this paper, a new method for impulsive noise reduction and edge preservation in images is presented. Images of different characteristics corrupted with a wide range of impulsive noise densities using two impulsive noise models are examined using the proposed method. In the detection stage of the method, two conditions have to be met to determine whether an image pixel is noisy or not. Two predetermined threshold values are involved in the computation of the second condition to differentiate between corrupted and uncorrupted pixels. Only pixels determined to be noisy in the detection stage are filtered in the next filtering stage where small size sliding windows are used to significantly reduce blurring effects in the output restored images. Several measuring indices have been used to examine the performance of the proposed method compared with many existing state-of-the-art methods in the literature of the image restoration field. Extensive simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed method over other techniques in terms of restoration quality, and preservation of images with fine details and edges.