A Modified Algorithm for Removal of Salt and Pepper Noise in Color Images

In this paper a modified simple edge preserved denoising algorithm to remove salt and pepper noise in digital color images is presented. The algorithm has three steps: noisy pixel detection, replacement of noisy pixels, confirmation by comparing with a threshold. In addition a median filtering is added to improve the quality of the image. The proposed algorithm prevents the smoothing of edges in the noise removal process, by predicting the possible edges and taking the mean value from the predicted edge. In the proposed algorithm the computational complexity is less with maximum edge preservation. The color images are denoised by extracting the R, G and B planes from the noisy image, denoised separately and are merged together to form the color image, rather than converting to gray for denoising and then reconstructing from the denoised gray image. The algorithm is implemented partially in MATLAB and MODELSIM. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm yields visually pleasing images in terms of qualitative and quantitative evaluation compared to other standard algorithms.