Impulsive noise removal with the use of local adaptive non-linear filter

The goal of many image processing tasks is to recover an ideal high-quality signal from data that are degraded by impulsive noise, because the human visual system is very sensitive to the high amplitude of noise signals, thus noise in an image can result in a subjective loss of information. This work presents an elegant solution to the impulsive noise removal problem. The proposed technique takes into account three important factors for image filtering, i.e. noise attenuation, edge preservation, as well as detail retention. The conventional filtering schemes utilize a fixed shape of the moving window such as rectangle and circle. In contrast, the proposed spatially connected filter works with the moving window of signal-dependent shape. Experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed filtering algorithm compared to the conventional schemes in terms of both subjective and objective evaluations.