Fast adaptive and selective mean filter for the removal of high‐density salt and pepper noise

Abstract

A fast adaptive and selective mean filter is presented to remove salt and pepper noise effectively from images corrupted with higher noise densities. The algorithm achieves better results in terms of visual quality and in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio, mean absolute error, mean structural similarity index measure, image enhancement factor, and edge preservation ratio than many existing state-of-the-art algorithms at all noise densities. Adaptive filters that use variable window size produce better restoration of salt and pepper noise at higher noise densities than filters that use fixed window size, but they consume more time. This makes them practically impossible to implement them in digital image acquisition devices. Hence, reducing the execution time of adaptive filters is vital. The proposed algorithm consumes around 90% less time for lower noise densities and 50% less time for higher noise densities than the adaptive weighted mean filter, one of the best available adaptive filters in the literature for high-density salt and pepper noise removal.