Restoration of impulse noise corrupted images based on gradients

A new filtering algorithm is presented which can remove impulse noise from corrupted images while preserving details. The algorithm is based on a new impulse detection technique that uses image gradients. The proposed impulse detector can effectively categorize all the pixels in an image into two classes - noise pixels and noise-free pixels. The noise-free pixels are kept untouched while the noise pixels are filtered by a noise cancellor such as median filter. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides significant improvement over many existing techniques in terms of both subjective and objective evaluations. It also has the advantage of computational simplicity over those algorithms.