A New Fuzzy Multi-channel Filter for the Reduction of Impulse Noise

One of the most common image processing tasks involves the removal of impulse noise from digital images. In this paper, we propose a new two step multi-channel filter. This new non-linear filter technique contains two separate steps: an impulse noise detection step and a noise reduction step. The fuzzy detection method is mainly based on the calculation of fuzzy gradient values and on fuzzy reasoning. This phase will determine three separate membership functions that will be used by the filtering step. Experiments prove that the proposed filter may be used for efficient removal of impulse noise from colour images without distorting the useful information in the image.