A New Adaptive Switching Median Filter: Smaïl Akkoul, Roger Lédée, Remy Leconge, and Rachid Harba
A New Adaptive Switching Median Filter: Smaïl Akkoul, Roger Lédée, Remy Leconge, and Rachid Harba
A New Adaptive Switching Median Filter: Smaïl Akkoul, Roger Lédée, Remy Leconge, and Rachid Harba
Abstract—A new Adaptive Switching Median (ASWM) filter for Hence, they cannot preserve the image details and edges,
removing impulse noise from corrupted images is presented. The especially when the noise is high.
originality of ASWM is that no a priori Threshold is needed as in To reduce these effects and improve impulse noise detection,
the case of a classical Switching Median filter. Instead, Threshold
is computed locally from image pixels intensity values in a sliding we propose a new Adaptive Switching Median (ASWM) filter.
window. Results show that ASWM provides better performance in The originality of ASWM is that no a priori Threshold is to
terms of PSNR and MAE than many other median filter variants be given as in the case of a classical SWM filter. Instead, the
for random-valued impulse noise. In addition it can preserve more threshold is computed locally from image pixels intensity values
image details in a high noise environment. in a sliding window using weighted statistics. Thus, it is ex-
Index Terms—Detail-preserving, image restoration, impulse pected that this new strategy will lead to better performances.
noise detection, switching median filter. The ASWM filter will be described and compared to other me-
dian filters using Monte-Carlo simulations.
This letter is organized as follows. In Section II, we review
I. INTRODUCTION
the impulse noise removal principle using SWM. The ASWM
algorithm is described in Section III. Section IV gives simula-
MAGES are frequently corrupted by impulse noise due to
I camera sensors or transmission in noisy channels [1]. It oc-
curs in bioluminescence imaging for which the image acquisi-
tion results using different test images to demonstrate the per-
formances of the new approach. Finally, conclusions are noted
in Section V.
tion is disturbed by the presence of cosmic noise [2]. Cosmic
noise can be considered to be an impulse noise. For this appli- II. SWITCHING MEDIAN FILTER (SWM)
cation in bioluminescence imaging, a step of filtering is needed The principle of the SWM filter is reminded. A SWM filter
as a preprocessing step before the deconvolution task [2]. is a two steps procedure. First, a test decides whether or not a
The main approach for removing impulse noise is to use me- given pixel is contaminated by impulse noise: a pixel is contam-
dian-based filters (see, e.g., [1], [3]). However, since filters are inated if the absolute difference between the median value in its
usually implemented identically across the images, they tend to neighborhood and the value of the current pixel itself is greater
modify both noise and noise-free pixels. Consequently, some than a given Threshold [6]. If contaminated, a classical median
desirable details can be removed [1]. To overcome this problem, fitter is applied; if not, the current pixel is noise free and will be
many modified forms of median filters were proposed among not modified. More precisely, consider an image corrupted
which are the weighted median filter [4] and the center weighted by an impulse noise and the grey level value at position , .
median (CWM) filter [5]. Those filters tend to work well with Let be a square window surrounding this pixel. This window
low noise level, but poorly for highly corrupted images. To solve is of size where is an integer greater than
this problem, the switching median (SWM) filter [6] was intro- zero. The output of the switching median filter is given by
duced. The main idea of the SWM is to use an impulse detector
if ,
before filtering. This detector is based on an a priori Threshold (1)
otherwise
value to decide if a median filter is to be applied or not. Next,
many other approaches were proposed such as tri-state median where is the median value in the window and Threshold
(TSM) filter [7] and more recently, alpha-trimmed mean-based is a fixed parameter.
approach (ATMA) [8], directional weighted median (DWM) The numerical Threshold value is defined a priori or chosen
filter [9], and modified switching median (MSWM) filter [10]. after many data dependant tests. The literature shows that an
All of these filters usually perform well in terms of Peak optimal threshold in the sense of the mean square error can be
Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Absolute Error obtained for most real data [6], [7]. However, Threshold suitable
(MAE). However, the principle drawback is that they have for a particular image is not necessarily adapted to another one.
limited performance in terms of false and missed detections. In addition, an image is often non stationary and statistics in a
region may be different in other part of the image.
Manuscript received February 03, 2010; revised April 02, 2010. Date of pub- The next section presents the new method that does not
lication April 19, 2010; date of current version May 05, 2010. The associate require a priori knowledge and automatically defines a local
editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publica- Threshold.
tion was Prof. Carlo S. Regazzoni.
The authors are with the Institut Pluridisciplinaire de Recherche en Ingénierie
des Systèmes, Mécanique, Energétique (PRISME), Université d’Orléans, III. ADAPTIVE SWM FILTER (ASWM)
BP 6744, 45067 Orléans cedex2, France (e-mail: smail.akkoul@univ-or- The proposed method has the same general structure as the
leans.fr; roger.ledee@univ-orleans.fr; remy.leconge@univ-orleans.fr and
rachid.harba@univ-orleans.fr). SWM filter. The difference between the new method and SWM
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LSP.2010.2048646 relies on the fact that Threshold is not an a priori choice but is
1070-9908/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE
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588 IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS
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AKKOUL et al.: NEW ADAPTIVE SWITCHING MEDIAN FILTER 589
TABLE I TABLE II
PSNR (DB) AND MAE FOR A PROBABILITY OF 30% RANDOM-VALUED THE NOISE DETECTION COMPARISON RESULTS FOR THE IMAGE
IMPULSIVE NOISEBEST RESULTS ARE BOLD PRINTED. “LENA” CORRUPTED BY RANDOM-VALUED IMPULSIVE NOISE.
BEST RESULTS ARE BOLD PRINTED
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590 IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS
REFERENCES
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