IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 14, NO.

3, MARCH 2007

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A New Fast and Efcient Decision-Based Algorithm for Removal of High-Density Impulse Noises
K. S. Srinivasan and D. Ebenezer
AbstractA new decision-based algorithm is proposed for restoration of images that are highly corrupted by impulse noise. The new algorithm shows signicantly better image quality than a standard median lter (SMF), adaptive median lters (AMF), a threshold decomposition lter (TDF), cascade, and recursive nonlinear lters. The proposed method, unlike other nonlinear lters, removes only corrupted pixel by the median value or by its neighboring pixel value. As a result of this, the proposed method removes the noise effectively even at noise level as high as 90% and preserves the edges without any loss up to 80% of noise level. The proposed algorithm (PA) is tested on different images and is found to produce better results in terms of the qualitative and quantitative measures of the image. Index TermsDecision-based lter, impulse noise, median ltering, nonlinear lter.

I. INTRODUCTION

MAGES are often corrupted by impulse noise, also known as salt and pepper noise. A standard signal processing requirement is to remove randomly occurring impulses without disturbing edges. It is well known that linear ltering techniques fail when the noise is non-additive and are not effective in removing impulse noise. This has lead the researchers to the use of nonlinear signal processing techniques. A class of widely used nonlinear digital lters are median lters. Median lters are known for their capability to remove impulse noise as well as preserve the edges. The main drawback of a standard median lter (SMF) is that it is effective only for low noise densities. At high noise densities, SMFs often exhibit blurring for large window sizes and insufcient noise suppression for small window sizes [7], [8]. The lters designed for image processing are required to yield sufcient noise reduction without losing the high-frequency content of image edges [5], [8]. However, most of the median lters operate uniformly across the image and thus tend to modify both noise and noise-free pixels. Consequently, the effective removal of impulse often leads to images with blurred and distorted features. Ideally, the ltering should be applied only to corrupted pixels while leaving uncorrupted pixels intact [2][4]. Applying median lter unconditionally across the entire image as practiced in the conventional

Manuscript received February 16, 2006; revised June 22, 2006. The associate editor coordinating review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Vince D. Calhoun. K.S. Srinivasan is with the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Deemed University, Chennai-600 119, Tamilnadu, India (e-mail: sshari_2003@yahoo.com). D. Ebenezer is with the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore-641 008, Tamilnadu, India (e-mail: auebenezer@yahoo.co.in). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LSP.2006.884018

schemes would inevitably alter the intensities and remove the signal details of uncorrupted pixels. Therefore, a noise-detection process to discriminate between uncorrupted pixels and the corrupted pixels prior to applying nonlinear ltering is highly desirable. AMF, decision-based, or switching median lters [2], [3], [6] have been proposed with this objective. Possible noisy pixels are identied and replaced by using median value or its variant while leaving uncorrupted pixels unchanged. The performance of AMF is good at lower noise density levels, due to the fact that there are only fewer corrupted pixels that are replaced by the median values. At higher noise densities, the number of replacements of corrupted pixel increases considerably; increasing window size will provide better noise removal performance; however, the corrupted pixel values and replaced median pixel values are less correlated. As a consequence, the edges are smeared signicantly. The main drawback of decision-based or switching median lter is that dening a robust decision measure is difcult [4], because the decision is usually based on a predened threshold value. An additional drawback is that the noisy pixels are replaced by some median value in their vicinity without taking into account local features such as possible presence of edges. Hence, details and edges are not recovered satisfactorily, especially when the noise level is high. To overcome the above drawbacks Chan and Nikolova [1] have proposed a two-phase algorithm. In the rst phase of this algorithm, an adaptive median lter (AMF) is used to classify corrupted and uncorrupted pixels; in the second phase, specialized regularization method is applied to the noisy pixels to preserve the edges and noise suppression. The main drawback of this method is that the processing time is very high because it uses a very large window size of 39 39 in both phases to obtain the optimum output; in addition, more complex circuitry is needed for their implementation as well as the determination of smoothing factor . To overcome this problem, a new algorithm is proposed in this letter; the corrupted pixels are replaced by either the median pixel or neighborhood pixel in contrast to AMF and other existing algorithms that use only median values for replacement of corrupted pixels. At higher noise densities, the median value may also be a noisy pixel in which case neighborhood pixels are used for replacement; this provides higher correlation between the corrupted pixel and neighborhood pixel. Higher correlation gives rise to better edge preservation. In addition, the proposed algorithm (PA) uses simple xed length window of size 3 3, and hence, it requires signicantly lower processing time compared with AMF and other algorithms. II. PROPOSED ALGORITHM In SMF, each and every pixel is processed and is replaced by the median of its neighborhood values. The PA processes the corrupted image by rst detecting the impulse noise. The

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detection of noisy and noise-free pixels is decided by checking whether the value of a processed pixel element lies between the maximum and minimum values that occur inside the selected window. This is because the impulse noise pixels can take the maximum and minimum values in the dynamic range (0, 255) [1]. If the value of the pixel processed is within the range, then it is an uncorrupted pixel and left unchanged. If the value does not lie within this range, then it is a noisy pixel and is replaced by the median value of the window or by its neighborhood values. A. Illustration Case 1)

Case 2)

; the pixel being processed is left unchanged. Otherwise, P(X,Y) is a corrupted pixel. Case 2) If P(X,Y) is a corrupted pixel, it is replaced by its median value if and . Case 3) If is not satised or , then is a noisy pixel. In this case, the P(X,Y) is replaced by the value of neighborhood pixel value. Step 4) Steps 1 to 3 are repeated until the processing is completed for the entire image. In the proposed method, during the third step of right diagonal sorting itself, the median, maximum, and minimum pixels values within the selected window are obtained. Although the entire window is not sorted in the ascending order, the median value is obtained. As seen above, after the computation of median for the elements in the window at a particular position, the processing element of the window is checked for its nature, i.e., whether it is the original pixel value or the noise value. Then the processing element of the window considered is replaced with the corresponding value (as in cases 13). Subsequently, the window moves toward the right for a new set of window values; this processing as well as the updating procedure are repeated until the end of the image element is reached. III. SIMULATION RESULTS

Case 3)

The performance of the algorithm is tested with different gray scale images such as girl.jpg (see Table I) lena.gif (see Table II), and with their dynamic range of values [0,255]. In the simulation, images will be corrupted by impulse noise (salt and pepper noise), where 255 represents salt and 0 represents the pepper noise with equal probability. The noise levels are varied from 10% to 90% with increments of 10%, and restoration performances are quantitatively measured by peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and image enhancement factor (IEF)

If the noise density is high, there is a possibility that the median value is also a noise value. In the latter case, the pixel processed is replaced by the previously processed adjacent neighborhood pixel value in place of the median value. The PA is as follows. Step 1) A 2-D window of size 3 3 is selected. Assume the pixel to be processed is P(X, Y). Step 2) The pixel values inside the window are sorted, and , , and are determined as follows. a) The rows of the window are arranged in ascending order. b) The columns of the window are arranged in ascending order. c) The right diagonal of the window is now arranged in ascending order. Now the rst element of the window is the minimum value , the last element of the window is the maximum value , and the middle element of the window is the median value . Step 3) Case 1) The P(X,Y) is an uncorrupted pixel if , , and

and

where MSE IEF n R x

mean square error; image enhancement factor; corrupted image; original image; size of image; restored image.

The PSNR, IEF ,and CPU computation time in seconds are calculated for the PA, and a comparison of performance with

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TABLE I PSNR, IEF, AND COMPUTATION TIME FOR VARIOUS FILTERS FOR girl.jpg IMAGE AT DIFFERENT NOISE DENSITIES

TABLE II PSNR, IEF, AND COMPUTATION TIME FOR VARIOUS FILTERS FOR lena.gif IMAGE AT DIFFERENT NOISE DENSITIES

TABLE III COMPARISON TABLE OF PSNR AND CPU TIME IN SECONDS FOR LENA IMAGE

various lters, namely, SMF, AMF, decision-based median lters, and TDF, are shown in Tables IIII. The simulation results in Tables I and II show that at higher noise levels, PSNR values of SMF, AMF, and TDF are very low compared to the PA. The PA also has superior performance in comparison with other decision-based median [4], [6] and switching lters [2], [4]. The important aspect of the new PA is that it uses a xed 3 3 window for processing, leading to simple physical realization as well as much smaller computation time. MATLAB 6.5 (R13) on a PC equipped with 1.8-GHz CPU and 256 MB of RAM memory has been employed for the evaluation of computation time of all algorithms. For qualitative analysis, performances of the lters are tested at different levels of noise densities, and the results are shown in Figs. 14. In Fig. 1, the rst column represents original images, and the second column represents noisy images at different densities. Subsequent columns represent the processed images for SMF, AMF, TDF, and PA, respectively. Figs. 24 are based on the test results performed on the girl.jpg image, and the results are also tabulated in Table I. Fig. 2 shows that the PA provides better PSNR when compared with SMF, AMF, and TDF

for various values of noise density. Figs. 3 and 4 represent the IEF and computation time required at various noise densities for different algorithms. Tables II and III display similar results on the Lena image. IV. CONCLUSION A new algorithm has been proposed to address two problems, namely, blurring of images for large window sizes and poor noise removal for smaller window sizes, which are commonly encountered in SMFs. Results reveal that the proposed lter exhibits better performance in comparison with SMF, AMF, and TD lters in terms of higher PSNR and IEF. In contrast to AMF and other existing algorithms, the PA uses a small 3 3 window having only neighbors of the corrupted pixel that have higher correlation; this provides more edge details, leading to better edge preservation. The proposed lter also shows consistent and stable performance across a wide range of noise densities varying from 10%90%. Computation time is also reduced by the factor of 150 to 200 compared with the two-phase algorithm [1]. Effective noise removal can be observed even up to 90%

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Fig. 1. Simulation results of different lters column. (a) Original image. (b) Noisy corrupted image. (c) Output for SMF. (d) Output for AMF. (e) Output for TDF. (f) Output for PA. Row 1 shows the girl image corrupted by 70% noise. Row 2 shows the girl image corrupted by 90% noise. Row 3 shows the Lena image corrupted by 70% noise. Row 4 shows the Lena image corrupted by 90% noise.

Fig. 4. Noise density versus computation time in seconds. Fig. 2. Noise density versus PSNR.

REFERENCES
[1] R. H. Chan, C.-W. Ho, and M. Nikolova, Salt and pepper noise removal by median type noise detectors and detail preserving regularization, IEEE Trans. Image Process., vol. 14, no. 10, pp. 14791485, Oct. 2005. [2] S. Zhang and M. A. Karim, A new impulse detector for switching median lters, IEEE Signal Process. Lett., vol. 9, no. 11, pp. 360363, Nov. 2002. [3] H.-L. Eng and K.-K. Ma, Noise adaptive soft-switching median lter, IEEE Trans. Image Process., vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 242251, Feb. 2001. [4] G. Pok and J.-C. Liu, Decision based median lter improved by predictions, in Proc. ICIP, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 410413. [5] T. Sun and Y. Neuvo, Detail-preserving median based lters in image processing, Pattern Recognit. Lett., vol. 15, pp. 341347, 1994. [6] D. Florencio and T. Schafer, Decision-based median lter using local signal statistics, in Proc. SPIE Int. Symp. Visual Communications Image Processing, Chicago, IL, Sep. 1994. [7] I. Pitas and A. N. Venetsanopoulos, Nonlinear Digital Filters Principles and Applications. Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 1990. [8] C. A. Pomalaza-Racz and C. D. Macgillem, An adaptive non linear edge preserving lter, IEEE Trans. Acoust., Speech, Signal Process., vol. ASSP-32, pp. 571576, Jun. 1984.

Fig. 3. Noise density versus IEF.

noise density level, while edges are preserved up to 80%. The PA requires simple physical realization structures.