Adaptive Technique of Impulsive Noise Removal in Color Images

In this paper an adaptive filtering technique for impulsive noise reduction 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, is used as an indicator of the strength of impulses injected into the image by the noise process. The output of the proposed filter is a weighted mean of the central pixel and the vector median of samples in the filtering window. The new filter outperforms existing designs for low noise contamination and can be used in various applications in which the detail preserving noise reduction is required. Key–Words: Color image processing, noise removal, noise filtering, image enhancement, vector median filter