Progressive switching median filter for the removal of impulse noise from highly corrupted images

Abstract

A new median-based filter, progressive switching median (PSM) filter, is proposed to restore images corrupted by salt-pepper impulse noise. The algorithm is developed by the following two main points: 1) switching scheme—an impulse detection algorithm is used before filtering, thus only a proportion of all the pixels will be filtered and 2) progressive methods—both the impulse detection and the noise filtering procedures are progressively applied through several iterations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is better than traditional median-based filters and is particularly effective for the cases where the images are very highly corrupted.