A two-stage filter for high density salt and pepper denoising

Image restoration is an important and interesting problem in the field of image processing because it improves the quality of input images, which facilitates postprocessing tasks. The salt-and-pepper noise has a simpler structure than other noises, such as Gaussian and Poisson noises, but is a very common type of noise caused by many electronic devices. In this article, we propose a two-stage filter to remove high-density salt-and-pepper noise on images. The range of application of the proposed denoising method goes from low-density to high-density corrupted images. In the experiments, we assessed the image quality after denoising using the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity metric. We also compared our method against other similar state-of-the-art denoising methods to prove its effectiveness for salt and pepper noise removal. From the findings, one can conclude that the proposed method can successfully remove super-high-density noise with noise level above 90%.