Impulse noise is a category of (acoustic) noise that includes unwanted, almost instantaneous (thus impulse-like) sharp sounds (like clicks and pops)—typically caused by electromagnetic interference, scratches on disks, gunfire, explosions, pickleball play, and synchronization issues in digital audio. High levels of such a noise (200+ decibels) may damage internal organs[citation needed], while 180 decibels are enough to damage human ears.
An impulse noise filter can enhance the quality of noisy signals to achieve robustness in pattern recognition and adaptive control systems. A classic filter used to remove impulse noise is the median filter, at the expense of signal degradation. Thus it's quite common to get better performing impulse noise filters with model-based systems, which are programmed with the time and frequency properties of the noise to remove only impulse obliterated samples.[1]
