A Two-Stage Algorithm for the Detection and Removal of Random-Valued Impulse Noise Based on Local Similarity

A two-stage denoising algorithm based on local similarity is proposed to process lowly and moderate corrupted images with random-valued impulse noise in this paper. In the noise detection stage, the pixel to be detected is centered and the local similarity between the pixel and each pixel in its neighborhood is calculated, which can be used as the probability that the pixel is noise. By obtaining the local similarity of each pixel in the image and setting an appropriate threshold, the noise pixels and clean pixels in the damaged image can be detected. In the image restoration stage, an improved bilateral filter based on local similarity and geometric distance is designed. The pixel detected as noise in the first stage is filtered and the new intensity value is the weighted average of all pixel intensities in its neighborhood. A large number of experiments have been conducted on different test images and the results show that compared with the mainstream denoising algorithms, the proposed method can detect and filter out the random-value impulse noise in the image more effectively and faster, while better retaining the edges and other details of the image.