A descent spectral conjugate gradient method for impulse noise removal

In most applications, denoising image is fundamental to subsequent image processing operations. This paper proposes a spectral conjugate gradient (CG) method for impulse noise removal, which is based on a two-phase scheme. The noise candidates are first identified by the adaptive (center-weighted) median filter; then these noise candidates are restored by minimizing an edge-preserving regularization functional, which is accomplished by the proposed spectral CG method. A favorite property of the proposed method is that the search direction generated at each iteration is descent. Under strong Wolfe line search conditions, its global convergence result could be established. Numerical experiments are given to illustrate the efficiency of the spectral conjugate gradient method for impulse noise removal. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.