Adaptive Impulsive Noise Removal in Color Images

In this paper a novel adaptive filtering scheme for impulsive noise removal in color images is presented. The noise detection algorithm is based on the concept of aggregated distances assigned to the pixels belonging to the filtering window. The value of the difference between the accumulated distance assigned to the central sample and to the pixel with the lowest rank serves as an indicator of the presence of impulses injected into the image by the noise process and adaptively influences the filter output which is a weighted mean of the central pixel of the filtering window and the vector median of its samples. The obtained results show that the proposed filter outperforms existing impulse noise removal techniques for low noise contamination and can be used in various applications in which the detail preserving reduction of impulses plays an important role.