Performance Study of Novel Median Filter for Image De-Noising

Abstract

Most common method of clearing image noise is through median filtration. Median smoothers discard outliers (or impulses) quite effectively at lower noise densities but, fail to provide adequate smoothing for heavily noised images for the simple reason that, in the conventional median filter approaches, each and every pixel of an image is filtered without concern about healthy pixels. To suppress this deficiency, in this paper, an improved median filter by the name Novel Median Filter (NMF) is proposed to enhance the effectiveness of the median filter at higher noise situations to provide a detail preserving de-noising of digital images. Proposed NMF algorithm is a 3-stage filter; first two stages are dedicated to selective switching median filtration in which noisy pixels are first detected and then the filtering operation is applied to restore their values with a valid (or a noise free) median computed for each 3×3 window position. Third level processing enables to remove any distortions present in the de-noised image. The proposed method, Novel Median Filter (NMF) is evaluated for its effectiveness in detail preserving de-noising capability on a large number of digital grey and color images affected with impulsive and non-impulsive noise in terms of objective and subjective quality measures. To better appraise the efficacy of the proposed method, Novel Median Filter (NMF), MATLAB simulation results in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE) and the de-noised images are obtained and are compared with those obtained for a standard median filter (SMF) and its few variants and meaningful conclusions are derived. Detail preservation capability of the proposed filter has been demonstrated through experimentation on medical samples. General Terms Image Processing, Nonlinear Filter, Median Filtration.