A new fuzzy-competitive algorithm for removing impulsive noises in digital images

Images are often contaminated by impulse noise. The major drawback of median filtering and its variants - that are widely used for removing impulsive noise - is the blurring effect for large window sizes and low noise suppression for small window sizes. In this paper, a fuzzy-competitive algorithm for removing impulse noise in images is proposed. The proposed algorithm utilized fuzzy inference systems for impulse detection. The detected impulses are then removed using long-range correlation information in a competitive scheme. The experimental results show that the performance of our method in removing impulsive noises is better than that of most other state-of-the-art methods