A Morphological Mean Filter for Impulse Noise Removal

Median filtering computation for noise removal is often used in impulse noise removal techniques, but the difficulties in removing high-density noise aspect restrict its development. In this paper, we propose a very efficient method to restore image corrupted by high-density impulse noise. First, the proposed method detects both the number and position of the noise-free pixels in the image. Next, the dilatation operation of the noise-free pixels based on morphological image processing is iteratively executed to replace the neighbor noise pixels until convergence. By doing so, the proposed method is capable to remove high-density noise and therefore reconstruct the noise-free image. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method more effectively removes high-density impulse noise in corrupted images in comparison with the other tested state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the proposed method only requires moderate execution time to achieve optimal impulse noise removal.