Using Sorted Switching Median Filter to remove high-density impulse noises

• An efficient Sorted Switching Median Filter (SSMF) is proposed to remove noise.
• In SSMF, the more noise-free surroundings, the higher priority to be processed.
• SSMF is easy to implementation, low computation and without a priori training.

We propose a novel Sorted Switching Median Filter (i.e. SSMF) for effectively denoising extremely corrupted images while preserving the image details. The center pixel is considered as “uncorrupted” or “corrupted” noise in the detecting stage. The corrupted pixels that possess more noise-free surroundings will have higher processing priority in the SSMF sorting and filtering stages to rescue the heavily noisy neighbors. Five noise models are considered to assess the performance of the proposed SSMF algorithm. Several extensive simulation results conducted on both grayscale and color images with a wide range (from 10% to 90%) of noise corruption clearly show that the proposed SSMF substantially outperforms all other existing median-based filters.