Decision Based Switching Median Filtering Technique for Image Denoising

Impulse noise heavily impairs the images during acquisition and/or transmission. Eliminating the impulse noise from the images without damaging their boundaries and fine details is an important and a challenging task in the image processing applications. A nonlinear technique based on an existing decision mechanism for suppressing impulse noise from the images contaminated by low levels of impulse noise is proposed in this paper. The proposed technique, called, Decision Based Switching Median Filtering Technique (DBSMFT) performs quite well in the presence of the long-tailed impulse noise while preserving the image features satisfactorily. The performance of the filtering technique has been evaluated by applying it on several test images corrupted by different levels of impulse noise and the results obtained are presented and compared with that of the existing filtering techniques.