Edge preservation of impulse noise filtered images by improved anisotropic diffusion

This paper provides a robust scheme for random valued impulsive noise reduction along with edge preservation by anisotropic diffusion with improved diffusivity. The defective impulse noisy pixels are detected by Laplacian based second order pixel difference operation where these defective pixels are replaced by appropriate values with regard of the gray level of their four directional neighbors. This de-noised image undergoes the diffusion operation where diffusion coefficient function is modified to make it adaptive by incorporating local gray level variance information. The proposed modified diffusion scheme effectively restore the edges and fine details destroyed during impulse noise reduction process. The effect of proposed diffusion scheme has been studied on various images and the results are compared with some existing diffusion methods which are independently used for impulse noise reduction and edge preservation. The results shows that the prior removal of impulsive noise before the application of diffusion process is advantageous over the direct application of diffusion for removing the impulsive noise. In addition, the results of the proposed diffusion scheme are compared with some of the median filter based methods which are effectively used for impulse noise reduction without caring of edge preservation. The proposed diffusion scheme sufficiently preserves the edges without boosting of impulsive noise components on images corrupted up to 50 % of the impulsive noise density.