Detail preserving median based filter for impulse noise removal in digital images

In this paper, a new nonlinear filter called detail preserving median based filter for removing salt and pepper noise and random valued impulse noise with edge and detail preservation is presented. The proposed method first detects the impulse pixel based on threshold values and then the corrupted pixels are replaced by the median value of the uncorrupted pixels in the filtering window. Since the proposed algorithm takes a decision whether the pixel under test is corrupted or not, it works well upto a noise density as high as 70% with much lower computation time compared to the other standard techniques. Experimental results clearly indicate that the proposed method outperforms many of the existing methods such as standard median filter, weighted median filter, center weighted median filter, recursive weighted median filter, progressive switching median filter, and recently proposed decision based algorithm in terms of visual quality and quantitative measures.