Improved switching- and counting-based filter for removing impulse noise from the color image

A novel switching-based filter is proposed to suppress the impulse noise and preserve the fine details in the color image. The filtering method is divided into two stages, the noise detection and the noise cancellation. In the first stage of noise detection, pixels with similar color components in many neighboring positions are counted to see whether the current pixel is corrupted by impulse noise. In the second stage of noise cancellation, the previous outputs and the detected noise-free pixels are chosen as the samples of the vector median filter operation to improve the performance on suppressing impulse noise. Several experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed filter outperforms many filters in terms of both noise suppression and detail preservation.