This paper describes two methods for impulse noise reduction in colour images that outperform the vector median filter from the noise reduction capability point of view. Both methods work by determining first the vector median in a given filtering window. Then, the use of complimentary information from componentwise analysis allows to build robust outputs from more reliable components. The correlation among the colour channels is taken into account in the processing and, as a result, a more robust filter able to process colour images without introducing colour artifacts is obtained. Experimental results show that the images filtered with the proposed method contain less noisy pixels than those obtained through the vector median filter. Objective measures demonstrate the goodness of the achieved improvement.
Keywords: color image filter; robust filter; vector median filter.