Deep Learning Based Switching Filter for Impulsive Noise Removal in Color Images

Noise reduction is one of the most important and still active research topics in low-level image processing due to its high impact on object detection and scene understanding for computer vision systems. Recently, we observed a substantially increased interest in the application of deep learning algorithms. Many computer vision systems use them, due to their impressive capability of feature extraction and classification. While these methods have also been successfully applied in image denoising, significantly improving its performance, most of the proposed approaches were designed for Gaussian noise suppression. In this paper, we present a switching filtering technique intended for impulsive noise removal using deep learning. In the proposed method, the distorted pixels are detected using a deep neural network architecture and restored with the fast adaptive mean filter. The performed experiments show that the proposed approach is superior to the state-of-the-art filters designed for impulsive noise removal in color digital images.