A novel approach for salt and pepper noise removal based on heuristic analysis of neighboring pixels

This paper presents a novel approach designed for removal of salt and pepper noise based on heuristic analysis of the neighboring pixels (SPHN). It is a two stage filter; in the first stage the noisy pixels are detected. Only the pixels classified as noisy are subjected to the filtering stage. In the detector stage the proposed algorithm analyses the neighborhood of the pixel under consideration, based on this analysis it classifies the pixel as noisy or noise-free. The noisy pixels are then subjected to filtering.