An hybrid filter for restoration of color images in the mixed noise environment

In this paper, an hybrid filter is presented for restoration of color images in a mixed noise environment, where both impulsive and correlation noise may be present. The proposed hybrid filter is composed of two stages, the first stage to remove the impulsive noise and the second to remove the correlated noise. The median filters and their variants are the most popular filter types used for impulsive noise suppresssion. However, median filters and their variants tend to remove fine image details and destroy fine texture in the mixed noise environment or when the signal to noise ratio is low. In order to overcome the limitations of the median filters, an adaptive, simplified-model Kalman filter(ASMKF) is proposed for the suppression of impulsive noise in the first stage of the hybrid filter. In the second stage of the proposed hybrid filter, to remove correlated noise, discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) filter is applied on the impulsive-noise-free image obtained from the first stage. The efficacy of the proposed hybrid filter is illustrated through implementation results obtained on the restoration of a color image.