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Adaptive Switching Rank-ordered Impulse Noise Filters: New Techniques, Results and Analysis
Justin Varghese

AbstractTwo new adaptive switching rank-ordered impulse

noise filters are proposed for the restoration of digital images corrupted by salt & pepper impulse noise: the Adaptive Switching Median Filter (ASMF) and the Adaptive Rank order based Switching Median Filter (ARSMF). The ASMF implemented by a two pass algorithm for impulse detection and impulse correction is an efficient filtering technique that works on to give consistent subjectiveness and objectiveness on images corrupted at low or high noise ratios whereas the computationally powerful ARSMF is more suitable for highly corrupted images. They identify the noisy pixels and replace them by a much valid intensity from the smallest possible neighborhood and keep up the image fidelity to a large extent. Experimental results and simulation analysis show that the proposed ASMF and ARSMF algorithms perform far more superior than many of the median filtering techniques including the top-ranking impulse Filters, the Progressive Switching Median Filter, the Rank order based Median Filter. The restored outputs are free from patchy effects, does not extend black or white blocks in the image.

Keywords Adaptive filter, image restoration, impulse detection, impulse noise, median filter, pseudo median. I. INTRODUCTION
IGITAL images are the sampled versions of continuous real world pictures which are typically discrete domain, discrete range signals. An additive noise process may corrupt these digital images in both the acquisition and transmission stages. Application-specific image filtering algorithms are needed to simultaneously remove the effects of the corruptive process and preserve important features of the images. Impulse noise removal in image processing often involves the removal of these salt and pepper noise from images which is a very important pre-processing step for most other subsequent processing tasks such as edge detection, segmentation and classification. In this area, early advances were dominated by linear filtering. They have had enormous impact on the development of various techniques for processing stationary and non-stationary signals. However, there are a large number

Manuscript received on June 21, 2006. This work was supported by the University Grants Commission under Grant F.No.30-260/2004(SR) (Major Research Project). Justin Varghese is with the Centre for Information Technology and Engineering, Tirunelveli, India (phone:+91-462-2323650; fax:+91-4622334363;e-mail: justin_var@ yahoo.co.in).

of situations where linear filtering approach performs poorly. The limitation is the inability to simultaneously eradicate noise and preserve high frequency information (edges, detail) in the presence of broadband noise. When signal and noise spectra are well separated in the frequency domain, linear filters cannot remove noise without altering the signal itself. Also, the Human Visual System (HVS) includes some nonlinear effects that need to be taken into account in order to develop effective image processing algorithms, necessitating non-linear algorithms; the non-linear behavior of optical imaging systems and their related image formation systems must be taken into account. Finally, images are signals that in general do not satisfy the widely used hypothesis of Gaussianity and stationary that validates the linear models and filtering techniques. In this respect, linear filters are not able to remove an impulse noise superimposed on an image without blurring its edges and smaller details. Median filters are the most prominent non-linear rank ordered filters that provide excellent results in the removal of salt and pepper like impulse noise than other spatial averaging filters [3] due to their perfectness, computational efficiency and simplicity. Though very effective in the removal of impulse noises, median filters are prone to modify uncorrupted pixels leading to the loss of finer image details causing edge jitter[5]-[6] and streaking [7]. The Weighted Median Filter and the Center Weighted Median filter gave more importance to current pixel, preserving good image details, but offered less noise suppression when the center weighted pixel itself is corrupted [9]-[12]. To overcome these defects, several variants of the median filter algorithms came up with the aim of correcting only those signals (pixels) corrupted by impulse noise, leaving uncorrupted non-impulsive signals (pixels) as such. i.e., decisions were to be made by the filtering algorithms as to when median is to be applied and when not [8]. Also the median value that is to correct the corrupted pixel is to be the most suitable and perfect. Satisfying these necessities, switching filtering algorithms came up, the Rank order median filter [13] excludes the central pixel itself from median determination. A Rank order mean (ROM) filter and a softswitching impulse detector, [14][15] at the expense of computational complexity, work on highly corrupted noisy images. Damage to the uncorrupted pixels is minimized by some of the recent switching algorithms [16]-[22], the

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Adaptive Two-pass rank order filter in two passes detects the irregularities in the spatial distribution of the estimated noise and selectively replaces original value of some pixels and filters the corrupted pixels, the Progressive Switching Median Filter (PSMF) [1] doing it in numerous iterations bringing down the computational efficiency. The Rank order based Adaptive Median Filter, one of the top-ranking impulse noise filters tests for the presence of impulses and restores the impulses by an impulse-free median but cannot work effectively on highly impulse corrupted images It is thus noteworthy that all the above said approaches though are good in focusing some aspects of impulse noise filtering requirements lose their focus on other vital aspects like the computational efficiency, mis-placement of non-impulsive pixels and so on. To overcome these drawbacks in this paper, we propose two new adaptively switching rank ordered salt & pepper impulse filters, the Adaptive Switching Median Filter (ASMF) and the Adaptive Rank-order based Switching Median Filter (ARSMF). These algorithms address the limitations of PSMF and RAMF and make possible a more perfect removal of impulse noise from images corrupted at very high impulse noise ratios in an efficient manner by keeping the fine details of the image intact, leaving the uncorrupted pixels untouched. They work very well on images corrupted with lower quantum of impulse noise also. The filter operators are computationally efficient, filter only the impulse corrupted signals of the degraded image by a more appropriate value chosen from its suitable neighborhood. They equally take care to keep the fine details of the image by avoiding the mis-detection of high frequency signals as impulse corrupted signals. The paper is organized in V sections. Section II makes discussions on the Standard Median Filter for features and limitations of the top ranking Progressive Switching Median Filter (PSMF) and the Rank-order based Adaptive Median Filter (RAMF) [2]. Section III introduces the distinct features of the proposed Adaptive Switching Median Filter algorithm and the Adaptive Rank-order based Switching Median Filter. Section IV does the implementation and simulation analysis on the output of the proposed filters obtained from various salt & pepper impulse corrupted test images to show their improved performance over the other conventional impulse noise filters. Conclusions are made finally in Section V. II. IMPULSE FILTERS - AN OVERVIEW The standard ordered statistics median filter is presented in this section along with the descriptions of the well placed salt & pepper impulse noise filters, the Progressive Switching Median Filter (PSMF) and Rank-order based Adaptive Median Filter (RAMF). Similar to other impulse restoration algorithms [1]-[2] our impulse filters are developed by prior information on natural images, i.e., a noise-free image should be locally smoothly varying, and is separated by edges. The noise considered by this detection algorithm is only saltpepper impulsive noise
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which means: 1) only a proportion of all the image pixels are corrupted while other pixels are noise-free and 2) a noise pixel takes either a very large value as a positive impulse or a very small value as a negative impulse. A. Median Filter for Impulse Noise Removal Median filter, the most prominently used impulse noise removing filter provides better removal of impulse noise from corrupted images by replacing the individual pixels of the image as the name suggests by the median gray level of the pixels from a chosen neighborhood. It is a spatial operator that moves on the digital image, on its movement replaces the individual pixels by the median of all the signal intensities in its pre-defined neighborhood. The median of this set of intensities is such that half of its values in the set are below the median value and half of them are above it and so has the most acceptable characteristic for replacing the salt or pepper impulse corrupted pixel of the degraded image than any other image statistics value. This is for the reason that if there is an impulse in the set chosen to determine the median, it will strictly lie at the ends of the set and the chance of identifying an impulse as a median to replace the image pixel is very less. For a current image f, which is noisy, the median filter is a sliding square window of odd size that moves over the entire image, replaces individual pixel of the image by the median of all the pixels contained within that window. Let the pixel values within a square window WW be represented spatially as

i w = {j=(j1 ,j2 ) /i1 - (W -1)/2 j1 i1 + (W -1)/2,

i2 - (W -1)/2 j2 i2 +(W -1)/2}
value, of all fj in the window, i .
w

(1)

Now the pixels of the noisy image are replaced by the median

= median {f j /j iW }

(2)

where fj is the pixel value at position j= (j1, j2). In correcting the salt & pepper impulses, the median filter though shows a reasonable restoration, makes numerous errors in its operation. All the signal intensities of the degraded image are operated upon by the median filter on no consideration of them being impulse corrupted or not which means a true signaled pixel is also replaced by the median from its local neighborhood leading to signal suppression. Of course this causes noise suppression when the image signal is corrupted. The window size of the median filter also plays an important role in finding the most suitable value, larger and smaller windows lead to distortions when the impulse noise ratios are low and high respectively. Thus the non-adaptiveness of the median window also gives an incorrectly chosen impulse substitute. Also the median value that is applied to the pixels of the noisy image is chosen from a neighborhood without minding the constraint of the impulse noise ratio. At higher noise ratios all the signal intensities chosen from a pre-defined neighborhood can go noisy and the median chosen from such a noisy region can be an impulse to question the very aim of an impulse

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suppression filter. These drawbacks of the standard median filter put forward certain basic requirements to be satisfied by impulse noise filters. The noisy pixels alone are to be modified by the most perfect value. B. Progressive Switching Median Filter (PSMF) Progressive Switching Median Filter (PSMF) is designed primarily for restoring highly corrupted images through distinct detection and correction phases. The filter detects the corrupted pixels into a flag image whose absolute deviation from the median exceeds a pre-defined threshold value in an iterative manner up to some pre-defined number of iterations and modifies them by the median of a particular neighborhood if the flag of current iteration differs from the previous one, else the pixel value of the previous iteration is retained. After the detection phase, the final flag image is employed for filtering the original image. Here again, an iterative process is carried to modify only those pixels of the original noisy image by the median of a window for which the flag was set in the last iteration of the detection pass. Subsequently, the flag is reset for each such modification. For the next iteration, this modified image and modified flag image are given as inputs. The iterations continue until all the flags are reset to zero. The drawback of course is the time complexity due to the numerous iterations involved both in detection and correction phases. It is to be noted that for practical purposes, the algorithm has chosen the maximum number of detection iterations to be 3, which is only arbitrary and may not yield optimum result for all images. Further, this process cannot guarantee that all uncorrupted pixels are identified and the impulses can also be wrongly identified as correct pixels. Further, the predefined threshold value employed to detect corrupted6 pixels need not be an optimum noise detecting value since estimation of the optimum threshold is difficult because it may vary from window to window. Thus the output of the filter for images with noise ratio above 60% is unrecognizable and less acceptable with prominent impulse patches; ranking little as an impulse filter for higher noise levels. C. Rank-order based Adaptive Median Filter (RAMF) In the Rank-order based Adaptive Median Filter (RAMF) algorithm, a pixel is retained if the median of a window around it is strictly between the minimum and the maximum value of the window and the pixel also is strictly between the minimum and the maximum value of the window. In case, the median of the window under consideration is strictly between the minimum and the maximum value of the window and the pixel does not lie strictly between the minimum and the maximum value of the window, then the pixel is replaced by the median value; otherwise, the size of the window is increased and the pixel will be replaced by the median of the increased size window, provided, this new median is strictly between the minimum and the maximum value of the window, otherwise, the window size is again increased up to some prefixed maximum level, beyond which the central pixel is left
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unchanged. This filter is found to be the best among the several variants of median filters suggested so far in terms of retrieving good quality image from an image highly corrupted by impulse noise and maintaining a better computational efficiency. The strong advantage of RAMF is that it always ensures only those pixels which are not impulses are retained while ascertains that even in cases where the pixels are to be replaced by the median values, they are not impulses at all, making sure of preserving image details. This double edged advantage has kept this algorithm superior to several new algorithms reported subsequent to its publication. It is pertinent to note that unlike RAMF which works very well for any type of image corrupted by impulse noise up to 50%, they were good for some specific types of problems only. The limitation of this approach is that both non-impulsive pixels and pixels corrupted by impulse noise are considered for determining the median value of a window yielding a pseudo-median (here, pseudo because of the fact that the median is not from among the reliable pixels) resulting in patches to occur in the images, especially when the impulse noise ratio increases beyond 30% or more and when the salt and pepper impulse noise pixels are unevenly distributed; i.e., when high frequency impulses are more than the low frequency impulses and vice versa.. Here, we often get only a noise as median, even though genuine non-impulsive pixels reside in the window under consideration. Increasing the window size in order to overcome the noise as median will affect the image fidelity. Again, even if we get a valid median, it need not be the actual median among the uncorrupted pixels except when the salt and pepper are equi-probable in the current window, which is a rare occurrence. Further the cases which could be disposed by just checking the validity of the central pixel are unnecessarily dragged to larger window computations. III. ADAPTIVE SWITCHING RANK-ORDERED IMPULSE NOISE FILTERS The drop-outs of the above-mentioned filtering algorithms are analyzed and the proposed adaptively switching rank ordered median filters take measures to overcome those drawbacks. The detailed description on the characteristics of the proposed algorithms is made in this section. The characteristic of the salt & pepper impulse that salt is always a maximum and pepper is always a minimum in any given window is the main principle used in the detection process of the proposed algorithms. A. Adaptive Switching Median Filter The new Adaptive Switching Median Filter is proposed for a consistent performance on the images degraded at all impulse noise levels. With distinct impulse detection and correction phases this filter identifies the noisy pixels by testing them for corruption with an acceptable noise detector and replaces them by a much valid intensity that can keep up the image fidelity to a large extent. The impulse detector is found from among the reliable pixels contained within the

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filter window whose dimensions vary adaptively with the noise ratio which prevents the mis-detection of signal as noise. The noisy pixels are replaced by a more reliable value obtained from a closer neighborhood of the corrupted pixel. The Adaptive Detection Pass A 2D binary flag signal b of size same as that of the image f to be filtered is initially created with bi and fi denoting the flag value and signal (pixel) value at position i = (i1, i2). The flag position bi is set to 1 when the signal (pixel) value at spatial position i is an impulse and bi is set to 0 when the signal (pixel) value at i is non-impulsive. Assuming that all the pixels of the image to be filtered are impulses, the 2D flag, b is set to 1 at all pixel positions initially. In the detection process, for each pixel fi, if the WD
i

which is smaller than fi (=minimum) or greater than fi (=maximum) as the case may be in the increased window. It is worth noting that we also stand a very good chance of getting either a salt or pepper in the increased window. In both cases, we can reset the flag at position i to 0 as fi will strictly fall between the minimum and maximum of the increased window, we stop the detection process for fi and move to the next pixel for noise detection. Otherwise this process is continued until a prefixed maximum window size, WDmax is reached beyond which we conclude that the pixel is an impulse and move to the next pixel for checking. It is interesting to note that in this algorithm we need not increase the window size, WD to a higher level whenever the impulse noise ratio goes to a very high level (i.e., more than 50%) because in all probability, we may get both salt and pepper even in a smaller 3x3 window, enabling the decision making immediate. The Adaptive Correction Pass: The above detection algorithm will leave the spatial positions set to 1 in the flag image b for the salt & pepper noisy pixels and the valid non-salt & pepper pixels the algorithm will have their corresponding spatial positions reset to 0. So the next step involves the correction of only those pixels in f for which the values are 1 in the flag image b. Here, we replace fi by the median value which is determined only from those pixels of f within the specified window WC x WC for whom we have 0 in their corresponding spatial positions in the flag image b. If there is no such valid pixel in the current window, we increase the window size, WC up to a pre-fixed maximum size WCmax for processing, beyond which we retain the original pixel as such. If we use WC to represent the set
i

represents the set of the pixel positions within a WD x WD window centered at i, then the detection algorithm of ASMF can be tracked as follows: ASMF Detection Algorithm
L evel 1 : Initialize W D L evel 2 : L et
WD
i

= { j = ( j1 , j 2 ) / i1 ( W D 1 ) / 2 j 1 i1 + ( W D 1 ) / 2 ,i 2 ( W D 1 )/2 j 2 i 2 + (W D -1)/2}

(3) (4) (5) (6)

m 1 = m in{ f j / j W D } an d
i

m 2 = m ax { f j / j WD }
i

D 1 = f i - m 1 ; D 2 = f i -m 2 ; If else if else G O T O L evel 3 ; L evel 3: M o ve to N ext P ixel. (W D < W D m a x ) W D = W D + 2 ; G O T O L evel 2 ; D 1> 0 a nd D 2 < 0 th en bi = 0 G O T O L evel 3 ;

of the pixel positions within a WC x WC window centered at i, then the ASMF correction algorithm can be tracked as follows:

(a) (b) (c) (d) Fig. 1.Original images used for analysis (a) Lena (b) Boats (c) Peppers (d) Cameraman If the centre pixel fi strictly lies between minimum and maximum of a window, it is always likely to be a valid pixel which can be retained, and so we reset the flag at position i to 0. If fi does not lie strictly between minimum and maximum values of the window chosen around it, i.e., when either fi=minimum or fi=maximum, we cannot be very sure that fi is an impulse, since chances are there that fi could be part of a smooth area without being an impulse. By increasing the window size, we stand a good chance of getting another pixel
IJISE,GA,USA,ISSN:1934-9955,VOL.1,NO.2, APRIL 2007
L e v e l 1 : In itia liz e W C L evel 2: if bi = = 0 t h e n o u tp u t f i G O T O L evel 4 L evel 3: le t
WC
i

= { j = ( j 1 ,j 2 ) / i1 - ( W C 1 ) / 2
j 1 i1 + ( W C - 1 ) / 2 , i 2 -

( W C - 1 ) / 2 j 2 i2 + ( W C 1 ) / 2 }

(7)

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF IMAGING SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (IJISE)

S={ f
j

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else if (W W m a x ) th en y i = x i ; G O T O L e ve l 3 ; else W = W + 2 ; G O T O L e ve l 2 ;

/ j

WC
i

a n d b j= 0 }

(8)

if if

S th e n m in (S ) f i < T C o r m a x (S ) f i < T C th e n o u tp u t f i G O T O L e v e l 4
e ls e o u tp u t = m e d ia n ( S )

(9)

e ls e

G O T O L evel 4; if (W C < W C m a x ) W C = W C + 2 ; G O T O L evel 3; e ls e o u tp u t f i ; G O T O L evel 4;

} L e ve l 3 : M o ve to N e xt P ixe l a n d d o step s 1 to 2 .

L e v e l 4 : M o v e to N e x t P ix e l.

In this algorithm, as we have considered only the non salt & pepper pixels for determining the median value for the replacement of pixels corrupted by impulse noise, we always get the best possible restoration in comparison to other variants of median filters including PSMF and RAMF, enabling very good visual quality in the restored images even when the image is corrupted to a very high level by a salt & pepper impulse source to the tune of 90%. For many images, the restoration is fairly good up to 96% of impulse noise, which is definitely a step forward in the restoration of impulse corrupted images. The threshold TC is a very small value which avoids misdetection of signals as noises. B. Adaptive Rank-Ordered Switching Median Filter The characteristics of ARSMF so well suits to restore images that are highly corrupted by salt & pepper impulse noise. It is computationally efficient, takes care to restore only the impulse corrupted pixels by a more perfect median value from an appropriate neighborhood by keeping the signal content of the uncorrupted pixels untouched. It identifies the noisy pixels by testing for corruption with an acceptable noise detector and replaces them by a much valid intensity that can keep up the image fidelity to a large extent. If iW represents the set of spatial positions centered around the pixel at position i=(i1,i2) within an adaptive W x W (where W is an odd integer not smaller than 3 initialized to 3) window, the ARSMF algorithm can be tracked in the following steps:
Level 1: Initialize W ; = ; Level 2: Let iW = { j = ( j1 , j2 ) / i1 ( W 1 ) / 2 j1 i1 + ( W 1 ) / 2 ,i2 ( W 1)/2 j2 i2 + (W -1)/2}

(10) (11) (12) (13)

m1 = min{ x j / j iW } and m2 = max { x j / j iW } D1 = xi - m1 ; D2 = xi -m2 ; If D1>0 and D2<0 then yi = xi GO TO Level 3; else {

The central pixel, xi of the window, W centered at i can be declared valid if its signal content is strictly between the maximum and minimum signal values of its local window. When either xi=minimum or xi=maximum, we cannot be very sure that xi is an impulse, since chances are there that xi could be part of a smooth area without being an impulse. So the closeness of xi to the noise-free maximum, max or minimum, min signal in the window around it is found by checking the absolute deviation of xi from max or min to be less than a very small threshold, TC which declares xi to be an uncorrupted high frequency signal and an impulse otherwise. As a result the threshold, TC discourages the mis-detection of uncorrupted pixels as noisy. The corrupted noisy pixel is restored by a median value chosen from among the uncorrupted signals of the smallest possible local window which maintains image fidelity. If such signals are not present in the smaller window, the window size is adaptively increased, the purity of xi is again checked by the same minmax test in the increased window and by comparing its absolute deviation from new min or max to be less than TC and if it is corrupted, is restored by the median of the uncorrupted pixels from the appropriate smaller window. The size of the window can be increased to fetch a valid median up to a predefined maximum window size, Wmax beyond which the central pixel, xi is retained. The filter takes concern to maintain the true signal value by checking its closeness to the minimum and maximum value of all increased window sizes and to replace the corrupted pixels with a more acceptable median to go with other signal contents. The filter gives a better restoration than many other variants of median filters including PSMF and RAMF, enabling very good visual quality in the restored images even when the image is corrupted by a very high level of impulse noise to the tune of 90%. For many images, the filter can provide fairly good restoration up to 96% of impulse noise adding to the relevance of ARSMF. Since the ARSMF detects and corrects impulse corrupted signals in a single algorithm, it can be more computationally efficient. IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS The proposed ASMF and ARSMF are implemented to restore impulse degraded images corrupted to various noise conditions and the performances of these adaptively switching rank-ordered impulse filtering algorithms are analyzed with the results obtained by the restoration of Rank order based adaptive median Filter (RAMF), the Progressive Switching Median Filter(PSMF) and the Standard Median Filter. The algorithms are tested over variety of standard images of which Lena, Bridge, Boats, Cameraman and

={x j / x j - m1 > 0 , x j - m2 < 0 and j iW }

if { min = min( );

max = max( );

(14)

if min xi < TC or max xi < TC then yi = xi GO TO Level 3; else yi = median( ); GO TO Level 3; }

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Peppers shown in Fig.1 are used here for subjective and objective analysis. Objective comparisons on the performances of these filters on images corrupted to various levels of impulse noise ratios are made with the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) values, the Peak Signal to Noise ratio (PSNR) of the images restored by them and the computational complexity of the algorithms.

For the final restored image, Z of size mn, the PSNR is given by
P S N R = 1 0 lo g 1 0
m n

( 2 5 5 )2
M SE

(15)

where Mean Square Error, MSE is

MSE=

i =1 j =1

( Z(i,j)-A(i,j ))2 m n

(16)

with respect to the noise free original image, A The Mean Absolute Error, MAE of the restored image from original image is given by

MAE =

1 m n mn i =1 j =1 Z ij

ij

(17)

Fig. 2. PSNR Analysis of Median filters for Lena image

whose horizontal and vertical spatial positions are tracked by the co-ordinate, (i,j). The objective improvement of the proposed switching algorithms is established by comparing with the restoration produced by the Standard Median Filter and the top ranking median filters, the RAMF and PSMF. The better Peak Signal to Noise Ratio for the restored Lena image as are given by the proposed algorithms is vivid from the plot shown in Fig.2.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

(h)

(i)

(j)

(k)

(l)

Fig. 3. Images restored by RAMF, ARSMF and ASMF respectively in each row against various levels of noise as follows: (a) Noise ratio at 40% (e) Noise ratio at 60% (m) Noise ratio at 90%.
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Of the PSNR values produced by the Median Filter, the RAMF, the PSMF, the ASMF and the ARSMF from images corrupted by salt & pepper impulse noise on varied noise ratios ranging from 0% to 90% that of the proposed filters are very high.

and a greater loss in image details as is also clear from the outputs restored from 95% degraded images( Fig.4., Fig.5). Fig.4. & Fig.5 gives a clear perception on the subjective efficiency of ASMF and ARSMF respectively.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

(h)

Fig. 4. Images restored by ASMF from images corrupted to 95% impulse noise

TABLE I Computation time, PSNR and MAE of RAMF, PSMF, ARSMF and ASMF at different noise levels.
Noise Level (%) salt 25 30 35 40 pepper 25 20 15 10 RAMF Computation PSNR Time(seconds) 37.32 41.58 57.30 95.10 MAE PSMF Computation PSNR Time(seconds) 95.17 99.89 103.72 105.21 24.7534 22.2340 20.4564 18.2981 ARSMF Computation MAE PSNR Time(seconds) 5.0123 6.1230 7.2134 8.8975 34.23 34.36 34.27 34.71 32.5621 32.7326 32.6457 32.5632 ASMF Computation MAE PSNR Time(seconds) 2.1342 2.0813 2.0741 2.1132 36.43 36.56 36.24 36.73 33.4131 33.3976 33.9214 33.6215 MAE 2.3544 2.3432 2.3564 2.3569

29.3622 3.1735 28.2952 3.2750 27.0877 3.8845 25.2102 4.6461

The ASMF gives a significantly better PSNR than all the other compared filters through all the noise ratios, its consistent performance at all these noisy settings(low to high) is worth mentioning. Though the performance of ARSMF is better than the ones provided by the Standard Median Filter, PSMF and the RAMF, images degraded at lower noise ratios are better dealt by the ASMF. The subjective quality of the proposed salt & pepper filtering algorithms is shown in Fig.3. Here for the images corrupted at the noise ratios of 40%, 60% and 90%, the restored outputs as are produced by the RAMF, the ARSMF and the ASMF are shown in the first, second and third columns of Fig.3. The visual outputs of the ASMF and the ARSMF are superior to those produced by the PSMF and the RAMF, the ASMF giving a better, steady output more equivalent to that of the original noise-free image through almost all the noise ratios whereas the ARSMFs more acceptable patches-free visual results are similar to those of ASMF at higher noise levels. At noise ratios greater than 60%, the ASMF and the ARSMF produces visually comprehensive restoration of the signal details where the RAMF could only give a blocky, blurred images with more vivid noisy blotches
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The tabulation of the objective metrics, PSNR, MAE and the computational time of the PSMF, RAMF, ASRMF and ASMF produced in the Table. I. shows the higher degree of performance offered by the proposed filters. The ASMF and the ARSMF rank high in all the metric values than the RAMF and PSMF. The larger difference in PSNR and MAE than the other two next best median filters quantifies the improved-objective quality of the proposed filters. As far as the computational complexity is concerned, the steady-paced ARSMF and the ASMF are less complex than the PSMF and the RAMF whose complexity increases as the impulses are unevenly distributed. For practical purposes, we have fixed the maximum adaptive window size for detection WDmax to be 7 while 11 is the maximum adaptive window size WCmax for correction. For RAMF we used the window sizes 7 and 11 for detection and correction whereas we used three iterations for flag image detection in PSMF. It is to be noted that the more the density of the impulse noise, more will be the value of WCmax , while less will be value of WDmax. The reverse will be the case when the density of the impulse noise is less.

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(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)
[5]

(g)

(h)

Fig. 5. Images restored by ARSMF fromimages corrupted to 95%

VI. CONCLUSION We have proposed more advanced impulse noise removal median filters that can give much acceptable and recognizable image restoration even with five percent signal input, while yielding better results at 40%., 50%, 60% impulse noise levels with an almost incomparable visual quality than many other median filters. While the other median filters develop impulse patches in the image making it very difficult to recognize at 80%,90% and 95% impulse noise levels, ASMF and ARSMF yields recognizable, patches free restoration, though with a little degradation in fidelity which is a good improvement in the field of restoration of impulse corrupted images. The larger difference in PSNR with other two next best median filters quantifies the improved-quality of the ASMF and the ARSMF. ACKNOWLEDGMENT We place our heart-felt gratitude to Prof.Dr.N.Krishnan, Head, Centre for Information Technology and Engineering, Manonmanium Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, India for his most valuable guidance without which this work would have been impossible. REFERENCES [1]
Zhou Wang and David Zhang, Progressive switching median filter for the Removal of impulse noise from highly corrupted images, IEEE Trans Circuits and Systems-II: Analog and Digital Signal Processing, vol. 46, no.1, Jan.1999. Hwang.H and Haddad.R.A, Adaptive median filters: new algorithms and results, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, vol.4, no.4, pp.499502, 1995 A. K. Jain, Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing, Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989. A.C.Bovik., Streaking in median filtered images, IEEE Trans. Acoust.,Speech,Signal Processing,n., vol. 35, pp. 493-503, Oct.1985. [6]

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Justin Varghese received M.C.A degree from Bharathidasan University, Trichy, India in 2002and M.Tech degree in Computer and Information Technology from Center for Information Technology and Engineering of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, India in 2004. Currently, he is a lecturer of Digital Image processing at Center for Information Technology and Engineering of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University and doing PhD in the same University. His research interests include signal and Image Processing, Visual Perception, mathematical morphology, fuzzy logic and pattern recognition. He is a Student member of the IEEE.

IJISE,GA,USA,ISSN:1934-9955,VOL.1,NO.2, APRIL 2007