Combination of adaptive vector median filter and weighted mean filter for removal of high density impulse noise from color images

In this study, a combination of adaptive vector median filter (VMF) and weighted mean filter is proposed for removal of high-density impulse noise from colour images. In the proposed filtering scheme, the noisy and non-noisy pixels are classified based on the non-causal linear prediction error. For a noisy pixel, the adaptive VMF is processed over the pixel where the window size is adapted based on the availability of good pixels. Whereas, a non-noisy pixel is substituted with the weighted mean of the good pixels of the processing window. The experiments have been carried out on a large database for different classes of images, and the performance is measured in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio, mean squared error, structural similarity and feature similarity index. It is observed from the experiments that the proposed filter outperforms (1.5 to 6 dB improvement) some of the existing noise removal techniques not only at low density impulse noise but also at high-density impulse noise.