Significance driven inverse distance weighted filter to restore impulsive noise corrupted X-ray image

Abstract

This paper presents a novel significance driven inverse distance weighted (SDIDW) filter for the impulsive noise removal in the X-ray images. The proposed SDIDW filter restores the noisy pixel using minimum number of nearest noise-free pixels to achieve good estimation while exhibiting low computational complexity. In the proposed filter, higher priority (weight) is given to nearest pixels compared to distant pixels and only sufficient nearest noise free pixels are determined to estimate the value of noisy pixel. A high level analysis of the computation complexity at varying noise density is done which shows that proposed SDIDW filter provides significant reduction in computation complexity over the adaptive median filters. Finally, the performance of the proposed filter is evaluated and compared over the state-of-the-art impulse noise removal techniques for varying noise density (wide range 10–90% and very high noise density range 91–99%). The experimental results on medical images demonstrate significant improvement in filtered images quality by the proposed filter over the state-of-the-art filters at each sample of noise density with small computational complexity.