Adaptive-hierarchical filtering approach for noise removal

In this paper, our contribution is to propose an adaptive-hierarchical filter that can remove the impulse noise while preserving the details in an image. The global image structure, which is estimated from a set of pyramid images, can be used as prior information in order to apply different filters adaptively. The proposed filter outperforms other methods in that it can make use of both local and global information efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed method produces better performance than many other well-known methods do. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.