The traditional median filtering algorithm has poor filtering effect on the images with high-density salt and pepper noise. Based on the theory of cyclic iterative processing, an iterative adaptive median filtering algorithm is proposed to remove the salt and pepper noise. Following the traditional filtering approach based on decision-making, the proposed algorithm adaptively adjusts the size of the filtering window and calculates the median of the non-salt and pepper pixels in the filtering window to replace the corrupted pixels.After that, the proposed algorithm adaptively determines the iteration number according to the noise density, so as to completely remove the salt and pepper noise and retrieve the original image.Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the standard median filtering algorithm and four other improved algorithms, the proposed algorithm can remove the salt and pepper noise with less running time and can efficiently retrieve the details of the original image for the images with the noise density varying from 10% to 99%.