Evolutionary design of efficient and robust switching image filters

Abstract

This paper proposes an evolutionary approach based on Cartesian Genetic Programming to the design of image filters for impulse burst noise. The impulse burst noise belongs to more serious image distortions that cause a loss of information in a series of pixels together. The results introduced herein represent a continuation of our research in the design of high-quality image filters. Whilst the previous experiments considered only basic impulse burst noise in which a burst corrupting a series of pixels could take a single value, this paper is devoted to the filtering of more realistic noise of this type where the pixels in a burst can take different values. In order to increase the probability of removing the noise pixels while retaining other pixels unchanged, the concept of switching filter will be applied. In our case it means that the filter system is designed by evolution of both a filter circuit and a noise detector. We show that the proposed method is able to design an efficient and robust impulse burst noise filter that exhibits better filtering properties in comparison with several conventional approaches and, moreover, it is also suitable for a high-speed image processing.