Uncertainties are the major inherent feature of impulse noise. This fact makes image denoising a difficult task. Understanding the uncertainties can improve the performance of image denoising. This paper presents a novel adaptive detail-preserving filter based on the cloud model (CM) to remove impulse noise. It is called the CM filter. First, an uncertainty-based detector identifies the pixels corrupted by impulse noise. Then, a weighted fuzzy mean filter is applied to remove the noise candidates. The experimental results show that, compared with the traditional switching filters, the CM filter makes a great improvement in image denoising. Even at a noise level as high as 95%, the CM filter still can restore the image with good detail preservation.