Impulse noise removal using 1-D switching median filter with adaptive scanning order based on structural context of image

Abstract

This paper describes the detail-preserving impulse noise removal performance of a one-dimensional (1-D) switching median filter (SMF) applied along an adaptive space-filling curve. Usually, a SMF with a two-dimensional (2-D) filter window is widely used for impulse noise removal while still preserving detailed parts in an input image. However, the noise detector of the 2-D filter does not always distinguish between the original pixels and the noise-corrupted ones perfectly. In particular, pixels constituting thin lines in an input image tend to be incorrectly detected as noise-corrupted pixels, and such pixels are filtered regardless of the necessity of the filtering. To cope with this problem, we propose a new impulse noise removal method based on a 1-D SMF and a space-filling curve which is adaptively drawn using a minimum spanning tree reflecting structural context of an input image.