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A Universal Impulse Noise Filter with an Impulse Detector and Nonlocal Means

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose an efficient filter for universal impulse noise removal. Operation is carried out in two stages: impulse detection followed by filtering. For detection, a robust local image statistic, called the extremum compression rank-order absolute difference (ECROAD), is designed to detect impulse noise in an image. For filtering, a universal impulse noise filter is proposed by combining the ECROAD statistic with the nonlocal means (NLM). The inherited switching behavior will preserve image details by selecting possible “noise pixels” for processing. Meanwhile, the joint impulsive weight is able to avoid the effect of impulsive components in restoring candidates. Simulation results show that the proposed filter produces excellent results and outperforms most existing filters for different impulse noise models.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. We would also like to thank authors Petrović and Crnojević for supplying the Matlab implementation of their algorithm. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 61070227 and by the NSFC-Guangdong Joint Foundation Key Project under Grant No. U1135003.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Information, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, China

    Guangyu Xu

  2. School of Mathematics, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, China

    Jieqing Tan

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  1. Guangyu Xu
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  2. Jieqing Tan
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Correspondence to Guangyu Xu.

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Xu, G., Tan, J. A Universal Impulse Noise Filter with an Impulse Detector and Nonlocal Means. Circuits Syst Signal Process 33, 421–435 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-013-9640-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-013-9640-1

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