A novel spiking cortical model based switching mean filter for removing impulse noise is presented. In the proposed filter, the noise detector using spiking cortical model is first adopted to identify the pixels that are likely to be corrupted by impulse noise. Then the detected impulses are removed by the weighted mean filter while the noise-free pixels are left unaltered. Extensive simulations show that the proposed filter outperforms a number of existing decision-based filters due to its excellent performance in terms of effectiveness in image restoration. Because of its outstanding restoration performance, the proposed filter can be used for noise removal in numerous consumer electronics products such as digital camera and digital television.

Fuzzy enhancement is applied in computer aided diagnosis of liver cancer from B mode ultrasound images as a pre-processing procedure in this paper. It was evaluated with three classifiers including K means, back propagation neural network and support vector machine using 25 features from first order statistic (FOS), gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), gray-level run-length matrix (GLRLM), Grey level dependant matrix (GLDM) and LAWS. In the analysis of 166 normal liver tissue, 30 hemangioma and 60 malignant tumor, our method improved the classification accuracy of three classifiers (K means, BP neural network and support machine vector) in distinguishing liver cancer, hemangioma and normal liver cancer from B mode ultrasound images. It is proved that fuzzy enhancement as an efficient preprocessing procedure could be used in the computer aided diagnosis system of liver cancer.