Adaptive progressive filter to remove impulse noise in highly corrupted color images

In this paper, an adaptive progressive filtering (APF) technique with low computational complexity is proposed for removing impulse noise in highly corrupted color images. Color images that are corrupted with impulse noise are generally filtered by applying a vector-based approach. Vector-based methods tend to cluster the noise and receive a lower noise reduction performance when the noise ratio is high. To improve the performance, in the proposed technique, a new reliable estimation of impulse noise intensity and noise type is made initially, and then a progressive restoration mechanism is devised, using multi-pass non-linear operations with selected processing windows adapted to the estimation. The effect of impulse detection based on geometric characteristics and features of the corrupt pixel/pixel regions and the exact estimation of impulse noise intensity and type are used in the APF to efficiently support the progressive filtering mechanism. Through experiments conducted using a range of color images, the proposed filtering technique has demonstrated superior performance to that of well-known benchmark techniques, in terms of standard objective measurements, visual image quality, and the computational complexity.