A switching weighted vector median filter based on edge detection

An impulse noise removal method based on noise detection and image edge detection is proposed to improve the performance of vector median filter. Corrupted pixels are first discriminated from the noise-free pixels by comparing the current pixel with the corresponding pixel in a reference image. Then corrupted pixels are filtered by the proposed weighted vector median filter. The novelty of this filter lies in its weighting technique based on image edge detection. The weight of each pixel is determined by its group which is related to the image edge. This method can suppress noise and reduce edge blurring effectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms all algorithms examined in this paper in terms of MAE, MSE and PSNR values. •A new weighted vector median filter based on image edge detection is proposed.•This filter utilizes pixels' location information other than pixels' intensity information.•A noise detector is applied by computing the similarity between current pixel and the corresponding pixel in a reference image.•The proposed filter can remove impulse noise and preserve details in color image.