Effective impulse noise reduction method based on local correlation

Abstract

This paper proposes a local correlation-based switching median filter for impulse noise reduction. The proposed algorithm consists of two main steps, detection and correction. In the first step, noise detection is performed using a scalable detection mask and morphological operation. In the second step, a corrupted pixel is corrected using the local correlation between the uncorrupted pixels in the mask. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can reduce impulse noise significantly and preserve more edge information than the existing state-of-art methods. In addition, the proposed method outperforms the most effective two schemes, which are simple adaptive median filter (SAM) and iterative adaptive switching median filter (IASMF) by an average of 1·68 and 0·49 dB, respectively. Therefore, we believe that the proposed method can be a useful tool for impulse noise-related products such as television, infrared-based devices and digital cameras.

Keywords:

• impulse noise
• switching median filter
• noise detection

This work was partially supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (No. 2009-0068833, 2011-0015901 and 2011-0003496), the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) grant funded by the Korea government (No. 2011-K000163).