A Particle Swarm Optimization Based Edge Preserving Impulse Noise Filter

Problem statement: Image sensors and communication channels often introduce impulse noise in image transmission. The most common filters available to remove such noise are median filter and its variants but the major drawbacks identified with them are blurring of edge detail and low noise suppression. To preserve the sharp and useful information in the image, the filtering algorithms are required to have intelligence incorporated in them. Approach: This research proposed a particle swarm optimization based approach in the design of filter. The filter weights were adapted and optimized directionally to restore a corrupted pixel in a mean square sense. Results: This results in replacement of noisy pixels by near originals along its edge direction. Various objective parameters like Mean Absolute Error (MAE), percentage of noise elimination, percentage of pixels spoiled showed that the proposed recursive no-reference filter performs 4dB better than the competing filters. Conclusion: This research aimed at presenting a new filtering framework for impulse noise removal using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO).