Noise Models and Filtering

The sources of noise in digital images arise during

image acquisition (digitization) and transmission.

We can consider a noisy image to be modelled as follows:

g (x,y)= f (x,y)+ (x,y)

where f(x, y) is the original image pixel, (x, y) is the noise term and g(x, y) is the resulting noisy pixel

There are many different models for the image noise term
(x, y):
Gaussian

Rayleigh
Erlang Exponential

Uniform
Impulse
Salt and pepper noise

Created in an image by electronic circuit and sensors as

a result of poor illumination and high temperature.

where g = gray level; m = mean; s= standard deviation;

(a)

(b)

(a) Original image (b) - Gray level Image (c) - Image with Gaussian noise

( c)

Radar range and velocity images typically contain noise that can be modeled by the Rayleigh distribution

Original Image

Image with Rayleigh noise

Gamma noise can be obtained by low pass filtering of laserbased images. The equation for gamma noise is:

Original image

Noise image added with Gamma noise

It is a special case of Erlang distribution. The PDF of

exponential distribution can be obtained by substituting b=1 in erlang PDF.
p

Original image

Exponential noise

The PDF of uniform distribution be:

Original image

Noisy image

The salt-and-pepper type noise (also called impulse noise, shot

noise or spike noise) is typically caused by malfunctioning pixel elements in the camera sensors, faulty memory locations, or timing errors in the digitization process.

Salt and Pepper noise can be analytically described by:

For an 8-bit image, the typical value for pepper noise is 0, and 255 for salt-noise

Many image enhancement techniques are based on spatial operations performed on local neighborhoods of input pixels. Often, the image is convolved with a FIR filter called "spatial mask".

Spatial averaging :Here each pixel is replaced by a weighted

average of its neighborhood pixels i.e.

where y(m,n) and v(m,n) are i/pr opposite images. w is a suitably chosen window and (k,l) are the filter weights.

A common class of spatial averaging filters has all equal weights giving

where

is the number of pixels in the window.

Another spatial averaging filter used often is given by

ie. each pixel is replaced by its average with the average of its nearest four pixels.

In practice, the pixels are not constant. Hence the window size
is limited. Due to this, the output image of spatial averaging is distorted in the form of BLURRING.

To protect the edges from blurring while smoothing, a DIRECTIONAL AVERAGING FILTER is needed. Such a

filtering process is called Directional Smoothing.

To protect edges from blurring while smoothing, a directional

averaging filter is used. Spatial average in several directions as are calculated

And the direction is found such that |f(x,y)-v(m,n,)| is

minimum

Original output

Blurred output

Filtered

Recap
Noise models Spatial Averaging Directional Smoothing