An Effective Algorithm for Denoising Salt-And-Pepper Noise in Real-Time

For computer vision systems to effectively perform diagnoses, identification, tracking, monitoring and surveillance, image data must be devoid of noise. Various types of noises such as Salt-and-pepper or Impulse, Gaussian, Shot, Quantization, Anisotropic, and Periodic noises corrupts images making it difficult to extract relevant information from them. This has led to a lot of proposed algorithms to help fix the problem. Among the proposed algorithms, the median filter has been successful in handling salt-and-pepper noise and preserving edges in images. However, its moderate to high running time and poor performance when images are corrupted with high densities of noise, has led to various proposed modifications of the median filter. The challenge observed with all these modifications is the trade-off between efficient running time and quality of denoised images. This paper proposes an algorithm that delivers quality denoised images in low running time. Two state-of-the-art algorithms are combined into one and a technique called Mid-Value-Decision-Median introduced into the proposed algorithm to deliver high quality denoised images in real-time. The proposed algorithm, High-Performance Modified Decision Based Median Filter (HPMDBMF) runs about 200 times faster than the state-of-the-art Modified Decision Based Median Filter (MDBMF) and still generate equivalent output.