Novel method for removal of multichannel impulse noise based on half-space deepest location

Abstract

A novel method is proposed for removing impulse (random-valued and salt-and-pepper) noise from multichannel digital images based on an adapted version of the DEEPLOC algorithm introduced by A. Struyf and P. J. Rousseeuw for calculation of approximate half-space (Tukey's) deepest location (median) in multivariate case. Due to its intrinsic multivariate/multidimensional nature, the proposed method eliminates the noise simultaneously on all channels without their separation, which preserves the spectral correlation between channels in a multichannel image. Denoising results of this new nonlinear spatial domain filter applied to benchmark images outperform currently used state-of-the-art filters for impulse noise removal from multichannel images in terms of both objective effectiveness criteria [peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR), mean absolute error (MAE), and normalized color distance (NCD)] and visual quality. The proposed filter successfully preserves the edges and fine image details, and is very effective for removal of medium and heavy multichannel impulse noise.