A low-cost VLSI implementation for efficient removal of impulse noise

Image and video signals might be corrupted by impulse noise in the process of signal acquisition and transmission. In this paper, an efficient VLSI implementation for removing impulse noise is presented. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed technique preserves the edge features and obtains excellent performances in terms of quantitative evaluation and visual quality. The design requires only low computational complexity and two line memory buffers. Its hardware cost is quite low. Compared with previous VLSI implementations, our design achieves better image quality with less hardware cost. Synthesis results show that the proposed design yields a processing rate of about 167 M samples/second by using TSMC 0.18 μ technology.