An efficient decision-based and edge-preserving method for salt-and-pepper noise removal

In this paper, we propose an improved two-stage scheme for the removal of salt-and-pepper noise based on an efficient impulse detector and the edge-preserving total variation inpainting model. We test the proposed algorithm on the four images corrupted by salt-and-pepper noise with a wide range of noise levels varied from 10% to 95%, and compare it with the six other well known filters. Further, we evaluate quantitatively the performance of these filters with the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), the measure of structural similarity (SSIM) and the image enhancement factor (IEF). The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed filter performs impressively in noise suppression and edge preservation.