An efficient directional distance filter for multi-band images

An efficient directional distance filter (EDDF) for multi-band color images is introduced to remove Gaussian and impulse noise. The proposed filter employs each pixel color component simultaneously and maintains the tradeoff between the edge preservation and noise removal. The noise filtering technique is improved by selectively using the average, the vector median or the Gaussian filter based on minimal directional distance criteria. The principle behind the proposed filter is explained and comparison with the other popular vector filter is provided. The results are tested on images from publicly available data sets. The proposed filter performs better than directional distance filter (DDF) in terms of VRMSE. The obtained results indicate that the proposed EDDF can remove the impulse noise and Gaussian noise from RGB color images more effectively than the existing state-of-the-art technique.