Minimum spanning tree-based random-valued impulse noise detection for a switching median filter

A switching median filter is effective for impulse noise elimination while preserving edges and details of an image. In the switching median filter an impulse noise detector is employed before filtering, and the detection result is used to control whether a pixel should be filtered or not. However, the conventional impulse detector tends to misjudge noise-free pixels constructing line structures to be the noises. We propose a new random-valued impulse noise detector based on the minimum spanning tree, and it is applied to the switching median filtering to eliminate the impulse noise effectively even for the image including line structures. Through the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed random-valued impulse noise detector is illustrated. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America.