SELF-ORGANIZING TREE MAP FOR ELIMINATING IMPULSE NOISE WITH RANDOM INTENSITY DISTRIBUTIONS

A new method is proposed to eliminate impulse noise with a random inte nsity distribution in digital images. The method is based on impulse n oise detection by means of a self-organizing tree map (SOTM) and a cla ss of noise-exclusive adaptive filters. The SOTM classifies the image pixels into clusters and locates the cluster centers that represent th e mean intensities of the impulse noise. Based on the detected impulse noise, the noise-exclusive filters are applied only to the corrupted pixels, using the true neighborhood information to estimate the pixel values. The filtering scheme presented can suppress impulse noise effe ctively while preserving image edges and fine details. Experimental re sults demonstrate that the performance of the noise-exclusive adaptive filters are superior to that of the traditional median filter family. (C) 1998 SPIE and IS&T. [S1017-9909(98)00401-2].