Impulse noise removal in highly corrupted color images

We present a novel and efficient technique for the restoration of color images which are highly corrupted with impulse noise. This is a detection-estimation based approach in which outliers are first detected using a Teager-like operator followed by a locally adaptive threshold. Center pixels whose “energy” exceeds some threshold are replaced with the local marginal median. Simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed filtering algorithm compared to the renowned vector median (VM) and generalized vector directional filter (GVDF), which are commonly used for color image restoration. Monte Carlo simulations show the edge preservation and impulse noise attenuation capabilities of the proposed technique. The efficiency of the algorithm stems from its simple arithmetic operations compared with more demanding ones, e.g. computation of distances and angles in the case of VMF and GVDF, respectively