System for the removal of impulsive noise in image sequences

Abstract
This paper presents a system for the restoration of image sequences that are degraded by impulsive noise such as scratches or dropouts. The proposed system uses a multilevel block matching algorithm to estimate the motion between frames and considers the use of an impulsive noise detector to improve the quality of restoration as compared to a global median operation. The detector considers the temporal continuity of motion compensated image information and makes a decision as to whether a suspected discontinuity is due to an impulsive distortion or occlusion in the sequence. When a corrupted portion of the image is detected a motion compensated median filter is used to remove the distortion. The paper introduces an extended multistage filter for image sequence processing. It is found that the use of the detector cannot adversely affect the filtered image when compared to the globally filtered image, and the detail preservation is generally better. The speed of processing is also increased since the number of median filtering operations is considerably reduced.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: