An improved recursive and adaptive median filter for high density impulse noise

An improved recursive and adaptive median filter (RAMF) for the restoration of images corrupted with high density impulse noise is proposed in the present paper. Adaptive operation of the filter is justified with the variation in size of working window which is centered at noisy pixels. Based on the presence of noise-free pixel(s), the size of working window changes. The noisy pixels are filtered through the replacement of their values using both noise-free pixels of the current working window and previously processed noisy pixels of that window. These processed noisy pixels are obtained recursively. The combined effort thus provides an improved platform for filtering high density impulse noise of images. Experimental results with several real-time noisy images show that the proposed RAMF outperforms other state-of-the-art filters quantitatively in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and image enhancement factor (IEF). The superiority of the filter is also justified qualitatively through visual interpretation.