Adaptive Edge Preserving Weighted Mean Filter for Removing Random-Valued Impulse Noise

Abstract

This paper proposes an adaptive noise detector and a new weighted mean filter to remove random-valued impulse noise from the images. Unlike other noise detectors, the proposed detector computes a new and adaptive threshold for each pixel. The detection accuracy is further improved by employing edge identification stage to ensure that the edge pixels are not incorrectly detected as noisy pixels. Thus, preserving the edges avoids faulty detection of noise. In the filtering stage, a new weighted mean filter is designed to filter only those pixels which are identified as noisy in the first stage. Different from other filters, the proposed filter divides the pixels into clusters of noisy and clean pixels and thus takes into only clean pixels to find the replacement of the noisy pixel. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art noise detection methods in suppressing random valued impulse noise.