Context model based edge preservation filter for impulse noise removal

In this article, a new edge preserving contextual model based image restoration technique is proposed for images affected by impulse noise. The proposed restoration technique consists of two stages: noisy pixel identification and restoration. Center sliding window is considered as current processing pixel for both noisy pixel identification and restoration. In the first stage of the proposed technique, we follow an absolute directional difference of the neighborhood pixels to identify the pixels those are affected by impulse noise. We propose an edge preserving contextual model to restore the noisy pixels. The noise correction stage of the proposed scheme depends on the context model of the noise-free pixels in the selected window. The parameters of the contextual model are obtained using a Gaussian kernel. The proposed algorithm is tested on nine benchmark test images. The evaluation of the proposed algorithm is carried out by comparing it against nine competitive state-of-the-art algorithms for impulse noise removal. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Structural Similarity Index (MSSIM), Non-shifted Edge Ratio (NSER) and Correlation Factor (CF) performance measures. Experimental results corroborate that the proposed algorithm provides better performance than the existing state-of-art impulse denoising methods.