Progressive switching median filter for the removal of impulse noise from highly corrupted images

A new median-based filter, progressive switching median (PSM) filter, is proposed to restore images corrupted by salt-pepper impulse noise. The algorithm is developed by the following two main points: 1) switching scheme-an impulse detection algorithm is used before filtering, thus only a proportion of all the pixels will be filtered and 2) progressive methods-both the impulse detection and the noise filtering procedures are progressively applied through several iterations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is better than traditional median-based filters and is particularly effective for the cases where the images are very highly corrupted.