Efficient Architecture for Median Filter for Image Enhancement

Abstract

Digital image processing is an ever elaborating and dynamic area with applications reaching out into our everyday life such as medicine, space exploration, surveillance, authentication, automated industry inspection and many more areas. Applications such as these involve different processes like image enhancement and object detection. The function of the proposed circuit is to detect the existence of impulse noise in an image neighborhood and apply the operator of the median filter only when it is necessary. Experimental results with real images demonstrate the improved performance. The proposed digital hardware structure is capable to process gray-scale images and is fully pipelined, whereas parallel processing is used in order to minimize computational time. In the presented design, a pixel image neighborhood can be selected for the computation of the filter output. The proposed digital structure was designed, compiled and simulated using the Modelsim and Synthesized in Xilinx