Reduced Ordering Based Approach to Impulsive Noise Suppression in Color Images

In this paper a novel filtering design intended for the impulsive noise removal in color images is presented. The described scheme utilizes the rank weighted cumulated distances between the pixels belonging to the local filtering window. The impulse detection scheme is based on the difference between the aggregated weighted distances assigned to the central pixel of the window and the minimum value, which corresponds to the rank weighted vector median. If the difference exceeds an adaptively determined threshold value, then the processed pixel is replaced by the mean of the neighboring pixels, which were found to be not corrupted, otherwise it is retained. The important feature of the described filtering framework is its ability to effectively suppress impulsive noise, while preserving fine image details. The comparison with the state-of-the-art denoising schemes revealed that the proposed filter yields better restoration results in terms of objective restoration quality measures.