Similar neighbor criterion for impulse noise removal in images

In this paper, a new method is proposed for removing and restoring random-valued impulse noise in images. This approach is based on a similar neighbor criterion, in which any pixel to be considered as an original pixel it should have sufficient numbers of similar neighboring pixels in a set of filtering windows. Compared with other well known methods in the literature, this technique achieves superior performance in restoring heavily corrupted noisy images. Furthermore, it has low computational complexity, and equally effective in restoring corrupted color and gray-level images. (C) 2009 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.