Digital images are often corrupted by impulse noise, and it is very important to remove random-valued impulse noise. Cleaning such noise is far more difficult than cleaning salt and pepper impulse noise. In this paper, we proposed an efficient way to remove random-valued impulse noise from digital images. This novel method comprises two stages. The first stage is to detect the random-valued impulse noise in the image and the pixels are roughly divided into two classes, which are "noise-free pixel" and "noise pixel". Then, the second stage is to eliminate the random-valued impulse noise from the image. In this stage, only the "noise pixels" are processed. The "noise-free pixels" are copied directly to the output image. Simulation results indicated that our method provides a significant improvement over many other existing algorithms.