A noise peak elimination filter

Abstract This paper describes a new approach to eliminating noise pixels within an image. This approach is compared with five other well known filter algorithms taken from the literature; it is shown that the new method, on the one hand, is simple and fast and, on the other hand, smoothes the objects within an image without losing edge information and without creating undesired structures. The central idea of the algorithm is to replace a pixel with its next neighbor in value within a 3 × 3 window, if this pixel has been found to be a noise pixel.