Robust local similarity filter for the reduction of mixed Gaussian and impulsive noise in color digital images

In this paper, a novel technique designed for the suppression of mixed Gaussian and impulsive noise in color images is proposed. The new denoising scheme is based on a weighted averaging of pixels contained in a filtering block. The main novelty of the proposed solution lies in the new definition of the similarity between the samples of the processing block and a small window centered at the block’s central pixel. Instead of direct comparison of pixels, a measure based on the similarity between a given pixel and the samples from the neighborhood of the central pixel is utilized. This measure is defined as the sum of distances in a given color space, between a pixel of the block and a certain number of most similar samples from the filtering window. The main advantage of the proposed scheme is that the new similarity measure is not influenced by the outliers injected into the image by the impulsive noise and the averaging process ensures the effectiveness of the new filter in the reduction of Gaussian noise. The experimental results prove that the novel filtering design is capable of suppressing mixed noise of high intensity and is competitive with respect to the state-of-the-art noise filtering methods.