A Fuzzy C-Means Based Color Impulse Noise Detection and Its Benefits for Color Image Filtering

Many median filters are developed for images affected by color impulse noise. A particular approach aims to preserve fine details by noise detection followed by filtering. The color noise detection algorithms vary as principle and performance. This paper proposes a new color image filtering method from this class, which jointly applies two methods of modified fuzzy c-means clustering for the detection of noisy pixels and afterwards performs a color noise filtering on the detected pixels only. The approach shows a good noise detection performance (in terms of false acceptance and false rejection rates), and the filtering performance in terms of PSNR and details preservation is superior to other filters (including vector median filter).