A Fuzzy Switching Median Filter of Impulses in Digital Imagery (FSMF)

This paper proposed a fuzzy-based switching technique that aims at detection and filtering of impulse noises from digital images. Two types of noise models are used to obtain the noisy images. In this two-step process, the noise-free pixels are remained unchanged. The proposed detection algorithm uses 5 \(\times \) 5 window, based on all neighboring pixels on the center of the window of a noisy pixel. Two weighted median filters are devised, and a particular one is applied selectively to the noisy pixel based on the characteristics of the neighboring pixels within the window. Instead of a single threshold, two threshold values are used in the proposed fuzzy membership function to partition the noise level, and accordingly, a filtering method is applied to restore the corrupted pixel. Experimental results show that the proposed technique outperforms the existing impulse denoising methods in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio and visual effects, with a comparable time complexity with the existing methods.