Switching degenerate diffusion PDE filter based on impulselike probability for universal impulse noise removal

In this paper, a switching degenerate diffusion partial differential equation filter (SDDPDE) is developed by introducing the switching operators for reducing all kinds of impulse noise, and especially for images having a mixture of salt-and-pepper impulse noise and random-valued impulse noise which is a shortage for most of the existing filtering models. Our SDDPDE consists of the coarse and fine filtering stages. In the coarse filtering stages, the switching operator depends on a simple noise detector. In the fine filtering stages, we introduce the notion of impulselike probability, and the switching operator depends on both a simple noise detector and impulselike probability. Our SDDPDE will denoise noise pixels detected by the coarse detector while further modify the so-called noise-free pixels according to impulselike probability. The main advantages of our SDDPDE over published approaches are its simplicity and universality. In addition, we demonstrate the performance of our SDDPDE via application to three standard test images, corrupted by salt-and-pepper impulse noise, random-valued impulse noise and mixed impulse noise with high-noise levels, and the comparison with the other well-known filters. Experimental results show that our SDDPDE achieves high peak signal-to-noise ratio and better visual effect. (C) 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.