A novel technique for removal of high density impulse noise from digital images

Mostly researchers use all pixels within a window to filter out the impulse noise. They increase the size of neighboring pixels with the increase of noise density. However, this estimate of all neighboring pixels does not give promising results for high level of noise density. In contrast, in the paper, we propose impulse noise removal scheme that emphasizes on few noise-free pixels. The proposed iterative algorithm search the noise-free pixels within a small neighborhood. The noisy-pixel is then repalced with the average estimated from noise-free pixels. The iterative process continues until all noisy-pixels of the corrupted image are filtered. The performance of the proposed method is tested using various impulse noise corrupted images. The simulation results show the proposed scheme is capable of removing high density of impulse noise effectively while preserving the fine image details.