Decision based adaptive median filter to remove blotches, scratches, streaks, stripes and impulse noise in images

In this paper, a novel decision based adaptive median filter to remove blotches, scratches, streaks, stripes and random valued impulse noise in images is presented. The proposed method is a two stage algorithm. In the first stage the noise candidates are detected using rank ordered absolute difference (ROAD) value. In the second stage the replacement is done by median of uncorrupted pixels in the filtering window. The filtering window is varied adaptively based on the number of uncorrupted pixels in the window. The visual and quantitative results show the proposed filter outperforms many of the standard filters in terms of different artifact removal with edge preservation.