Color image filtering based on impulsive noise detection

This paper introduces a new class of switching vector median filter. The proposed algorithm first uses four directional masks to analyze the color difference between the central pixel and its neighborhood pixels in the RGB color space and classify each color pixel into noisy pixel or noise-free one, and then employs the standard vector median filtering operations in the detected noisy locations to restore the corrupted pixels and leave the noise-free ones unchanged. The simulation results show that the proposed method excellently suppresses impulsive noise as well as preserving the image details well, and significantly outperforms the existing vector filtering solutions in terms of both the objective measures and the perceptual visual quality.