Decision-based non-local means filter for removing impulse noise from digital images

The decision-based non-local means filter is proposed to remove fixed-value impulse noise from the corrupted digital images. The proposed filter first identifies the corrupted pixels using the local statistics based noise detector and then removes the detected impulses using the reference image-based non-local means filter while keeping the uncorrupted pixels unaltered. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed filter can remove impulse noise from the corrupted images effectively while preserving image details very well at the various noise ratios, which leads to its significantly better image restoration performance than numerous state-of-the-art switching-based filters.