Fast Technique of Impulsive Noise Suppression in Color Images

Abstract

In this work a novel technique of impulsive noise removal in color images is proposed. The new approach is based on the calculation of costs of digital paths which link the central pixel of the processing window with its boundary. The minimum value of these costs serves as a measure of pixel impulsiveness. The output of the proposed filtering technique is a weighted average of the central pixel and its robust estimate, calculated utilizing the measures of corruption assigned to pixels in the local neighborhood.The experiments performed on a set of standard color images revealed a very high effectiveness of the new filtering design, comparable with the most efficient methods known from the literature. Additionally, the new filter is extremely fast and therefore it can be applied in real time image enhancement scenarios.