To decrease contamination from a mixed combination of impulse and Gaussian noise on color digital images, a novel hybrid filter is proposed. The new technique is composed of two stages. A filter based on a fuzzy metric is used for the reduction of impulse noise at the first stage. At the second stage, to remove Gaussian noise, a fuzzy peer group method is applied on the image generated from the previous stage. The performance of the introduced algorithm was evaluated on standard test images employing widely used objective quality metrics. The new approach can efficiently reduce both impulse and Gaussian noise, as much as mixed noise. The proposed filtering method was compared to the state-of-the-art methodologies: adaptive nearest neighbor filter, alternating projections filter, color block-matching 3D filter, fuzzy peer group averaging filter, partition-based trimmed vector median filter, trilateral filter, fuzzy wavelet shrinkage denoising filter, graph regularization filter, iterative peer group switching vector filter, peer group method, and the fuzzy vector median method. The experiments demonstrated that the introduced noise reduction technique outperforms those state-of-the-art filters with respect to the metrics peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), the mean absolute error (MAE), and the normalized color difference (NCD).

Medical images may be corrupted by noise. This noise affects the image quality and can obscure important information required for accurate diagnosis. Effectively apply filtering techniques can facilitate diagnosis or reduce radiation exposure. In this paper, we introduce a parallel method designed to reduce mixed Gaussian-impulse noise from digital images. The method uses fuzzy logic and the fuzzy peer group concept. Implementations of the method on multi-core interface using the Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) and on graphics processing units (GPUs) using CUDA are presented. Efficiency is measured in terms of execution time and in terms of MAE, PSNR and SSIM over medi-

To remove Gaussian-impulsive mixed noise in CT medical images, a parallel filter based on fuzzy logic is applied. The used methodology is structured in two steps. A method based on a fuzzy metric is applied to remove the impulsive noise at the first step. To reduce Gaussian noise, at the second step, a fuzzy peer group filter is used on the filtered image obtained at the first step. A comparative analysis with state-of-the-art methods is performed on CT medical images using qualitative and quantitative measures evidencing the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The parallel method is parallelized on shared memory multiprocessors. After applying parallel computing strategies, the obtained computing times indicate that the introduced filter enables to reduce Gaussian-impulse mixed noise on CT medical images in real-time.