A New Fuzzy Filter for the Reduction of Randomly Valued Impulse Noise

In many current impulse noise models for images, corrupted pixels are replaced with values equal or near the maximum or minimum intensity values of the allowable dynamic range. In this paper, we present a new fuzzy filter for a more general noise model in which a noisy pixel has an arbitrary value in the dynamic range according to some underlying probability distribution. This filter consists of (1) a fuzzy detection method, where we investigate if a certain pixel position can be seen as noisy or not and (2) a fuzzy reduction method that reduces the noise while preserving the fine details (like edges and textures) of the image. Experimental results have shown that the proposed filter may be used for efficient removal of randomly valued impulse noise without distorting the useful information in the image.