Fuzzy metrics and peer groups for impulsive noise reduction in color images

A new method for removing impulsive noise pixels in color images is presented. The proposed method applies the peer group concept defined by means of fuzzy metrics in a novel way to detect the noisy pixels. Then, a switching filter between the identity operation and the Arithmetic Mean Filter (AMF) is defined to perform a computationally efficient filtering operation over the noisy pixels. Comparisons in front of classical and recent vector filters are provided to show that the presented approach reaches a very good relation between noise suppression and detail preserving.