Suppression of impulse noise in medical images with the use of fuzzy adaptive median filter

A new rule based fuzzy filter for removal of highly impulse noise, called Rule Based Fuzzy Adaptive Median (RBFAM) Filter, is aimed to be discussed in this paper. The RBFAM filter is an improved version of Adaptive Median Filter (AMF) and is presented in the aim of noise reduction of images corrupted with additive impulse noise. The filter has three stages. Two of those stages are fuzzy rule based and last stage is based on standard median and adaptive median filter. The proposed filter can preserve image details better then AMF while suppressing additive salt&pepper or impulse type noise. In this paper, we placed our preference on bell-shaped membership function instead of triangular membership function in order to observe better results. Experimental results indicates that the proposed filter is improvable with increased fuzzy rules to reduce more noise corrupted images and to remove salt and pepper noise in a more effective way than what AMF filter does.