Remove Noise merged each small component into its most common neighbour
in one pass. When a speck was merged into a small region that was itself
merged away later, the region's flood fill skipped the speck's pixels
(already seen), so they stayed behind as a new island of the region's old
label. Higher Noise values merge more regions, so they left more such
islands: on noisy images the path count rose with Noise (70 -> 126 -> 206
paths from Noise 50 to 200 on one test image). denoise now repeats its pass
until one changes nothing; each merge joins two components, so it ends
(with a cap of 64 passes as a backstop). Labels shorter than w x h are left
alone instead of indexed past their end.
Tests: the minimal one-row case, a property test on random blocky noise
(no mergeable region under the minimum is left, and a larger minimum never
leaves more regions), and two noisy images whose path count must not rise
with Noise (both fail without the fix).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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