Noise in images can take various forms and have different sources. Gaussian noise follows a normal distribution and looks like subtle color variations, while salt and pepper noise completely replaces some pixel values with maximum or minimum values. Mean, median, and trimmed filters are commonly used to reduce noise. Mean filters average pixel values within a window, but can blur details. Median filters replace the center pixel with the median value in the window, which is effective for salt and pepper noise while retaining details better than mean filters. Adaptive filters vary the window size to better target noise without excessive blurring.