Image detail-preserving filter for impulsive noise attenuation

A new nonlinear filter is proposed for attenuating impulsive noise while preserving image details. The filter truncates the grey value of a pixel to the maximal or minimal value of its enclosed surrounding band. Impulsive noise inside the band is thus attenuated while image details are preserved as long as they stretch to the band. The recursive form of the proposed filter leads to a simple architecture for fast implementation. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this new filter for both noise attenuation and detail preservation. For moderately contaminated images, as shown in the experiments, the proposed filter outperforms the standard median filter, the centre-weighted median filter and the unidirectional multistage median filter in terms of mean absolute error and filtering speed.