An Efficient Switching Filter Based on Cubic B-Spline for Removal of Salt-and-Pepper Noise

In this paper, an efficient filter method for salt-and-pepper noise removal is proposed. This method is developed by using cubic B-spline. A noise detector is employed to check whether the selected pixel is noisy or noise free. In this method, noise free pixels are left unaltered. Since not every pixel is filtered, undue distortion can be avoided. Noise pixels are subjected to the filtering operation to reconstruct the intensity values of the noisy pixels. The noise free pixels are only considered in the filter operation. The cubic B- spline is used as a fitting function to generate additional values within the noise free pixels. The noisy pixel is replaced by the mean value of these pixel values. The window size is selected as 3 X 3 in the first step. If all pixels within the window are considered to be noise, then change the selected window size to 5 X 5. If all the pixels within this window are considered to be noise, then the noisy pixel is replaced by the previous resultant pixel. Comparison of the given filter with other existing filters is provided in this paper. The results demonstrate that the proposed technique can obtain better performances than other existing denoising techniques. As a result of this, the proposed method removes the noise effectively even at noise level as high as 97%.