A Study on an Image Restoration Algorithm in Universal Noise Environments

Images are often corrupted by noises during signal acquisition and transmission. Among those noises, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and impulse noise are most representative. For different types of noise have different characters, how to remove them separately from degraded image is one of the most fundamental problems. Thus, a modified image restoration algorithm is proposed in this paper, which can not only remove impulse noise of random values, but also remove the AWGN selectively. The noise detection step is by calculating the intensity difference and the spatial distance between pixels in a mask. To divide two different noises, the method is based on three weighted parameters. And the weighted parameters in the filtering mask depend on spatial distances, positions of impulse noise and standard deviation of AWGN. We also use the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) to evaluate restoration performance, and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than conventional median-type filters, in preserving edge details.