Impulse Noise Detection and Removal Using Multiple Thresholds for Image Restoration.pdfVIP

JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING 22, 189-198 (2006) 189 Short Paper_________________________________________________ Salt-Pepper Impulse Noise Detection and Removal Using Multiple Thresholds for Image Restoration * TZU-CHAO LIN AND PAO-TA YU ** Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering Wufeng Institute of Technology Chiayi, 621 Taiwan ** Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering National Chung Cheng University Chiayi, 621 Taiwan E-mail: csipty@cs.ccu.edu.tw In this paper, a novel decision-based filter, called the multiple thresholds switching (MTS) filter, is proposed to restore images corrupted by salt-pepper impulse noise. The filter is based on a detection-estimation strategy. The impulse detection algorithm is used before the filtering process, and therefore only the noise-corrupted pixels are replaced with the estimated central noise-free ordered mean value in the current filter window. The new impulse detector, which uses multiple thresholds with multiple neighborhood information of the signal in the filter window, is very precise, while avoiding an undue increase in computational complexity. For impulse noise suppression without smearing fine details and edges in the image, extensive experimental results demonstrate that our scheme performs significantly better than many existing, well-accepted decision-based methods. Keywords: image restoration, filter, threshold, impulse detector, impulse noise 1. INTRODUCTION Images are often corrupted by impulse noise when they are recorded by noisy sen- sors or sent over noisy transmission channels. Many impulse noise removal techniques have been developed to suppress impulse noise while preserving image details [1-7]. The median filter, the most popular kind of nonlinear filter, has been extensively used for the removal of impulse noise due to its simplicity. However, the median filter tends to blur fine details and lines in m