IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO.
6, JUNE 2018
Quaternion Switching Vector Median Filter Based
on Local Reachability Density
Zhiliang Zhu , Lianghai Jin
Abstract—Impulse noise detection is important to the restoration
of color images contaminated by impulse noise in switching vector
median filters. To increase detection accuracy, an effective color-
impulse detector is presented. A new color distance metric based
on quaternion theory is proposed. The proposed color distance
metric is used to calculate the local density of a color pixel. A hard
thresholding strategy is used to determine whether a color pixel
is corrupted by impulse noise or not (i.e., an outlier). The noisy
pixels detected will be restored by a weighted vector median filter,
while the noise-free pixels remain unchanged. The experimental
comparisons show that the proposed algorithm can obtain lower
false and miss detection rate, and produces better performance in
terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio and feature similarity measures,
compared to other well-known color image filtering methods.
Index Terms—Color images, impulse noise, local reachability
density (LRD), quaternion, vector median filter (VMF).
I. INTRODUCTION
OLOR images play a vital role in image processing and
C computer vision [1]. Due to the malfunctions and faults in
camera sensors, transmission exception, and other errors during
images acquisition, communication, or recording, color images
often suffer from the contamination of impulse noise. Hence,
the preprocessing of noise removal is becoming increasingly
necessary in image processing applications.
A great number of methods for removing impulse noise in
color images have been proposed in past years, which can be
roughly divided into three categories [2]. One is called marginal
or component-wise technique, which processes each channel
independently by the method used for a gray-scale image. This
method ignores the strong spectral correlation between color
channels and may produce color shifts or distortions. The sec-
ond category, which is called vector filter (VF) [3] treating color
images as vector fields, is widely adopted. The third category
Manuscript received December 24, 2017; revised February 6, 2018; accepted
February 12, 2018. Date of publication February 21, 2018; date of current
version May 2, 2018. The associate editor coordinating the review of this
manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Joao M. Ascenso. This
work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under
Grant 61370181 and Grant 61370179. (Corresponding author: Lianghai Jin.)
Z. Zhu, L. Jin, and E. Song are with the School of Computer Sci-
ence and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology,
Wuhan 430074, China (e-mail: ld_zzl@126.com; Lianghaijin@gmail.com;
esong@hust.edu.cn).
C.-C. Hung is with the Center for Machine Vision and Security Re-
search, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA 30144 USA (e-mail:
chung1@kennesaw.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LSP.2018.2808343
1070-9908 © 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Constantin Vertan. Downloaded on October 07,2020 at 11:48:39 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
843
, Enmin Song, and Chih-Cheng Hung
including partial differential equation methods [4], wavelet do-
main methods [5], soft-computing techniques [6], [7], and ma-
chine learning method [8] is also effective to remove color im-
pulse noise. For more information, the readers are referred to [9].
For color impulse noise, the classical vector filtering tech-
nique is vector median filter (VMF) [10], which is based on
the reduced aggregated vector distance ordering principle. To
enhance the effectiveness of VMF, basic vector directional filter
[11] and directional distance filter [12] are proposed. These
methods use Euclidean distances, angle distances, or mixed
Euclidean-angle distances to measure the distance of two color
vectors. They filter out all pixels in an image, no matter whether
the pixels are noisy or not. This will introduce blurred edges
and damage image details. To solve this problem, various kinds
of switching VFs have been proposed, such as fast peer group
filter for VMF [13], robust switching VMF [14], and switching
weighted VMF (WVMF) [15]. These methods usually contain
two steps: noise detection and removal. The switching methods
only restore the pixels that are identified as noisy in the first step
and thus preserve more details of original images. The effec-
tiveness of the switching filters is closely related to the accuracy
of noise detection.
To improve the noise detection accuracy, some effective color
distance metrics based on the quaternion representation have
been developed [16]–[20]. These methods can obtain satis-
factory restorations for impulse noise pixels, but with the in-
crease of noise density, their detection precision for noisy pix-
els decreases sharply. However, these methods indicate that
quaternion-based methods seem to be more effective in color
image denoising.
In this letter, we present a new quaternion-based color dis-
tance metric. Based on the new color distance together with
local reachability density (LRD), a new color-impulse detector
is developed. LRD was first proposed by Breunig et al. [21].
LRD was used to calculate the local outlier factor (LOF), which
is a classical outlier detection strategy in data mining. Wang
and Lu [22] used the LOF to quantify the distinction of a gray-
scale pixel polluted by impulse noise. Unlike Wang’s method,
the paper in this study only uses LRD to identify whether the
pixels in color images are noisy or not and then uses a WVMF
to restore the noisy pixels. The simulation results show that the
proposed method is better than the traditional VMF and some
other improved vector median filtering methods.
The rest of the letter is organized as follows. Section II de-
scribes the proposed quaternion-based color distance measure
method and provides an overview of LRD. Section III describes
844
the proposed method in detail. In Section IV, the experimental
results and comparisons are given. Finally, the conclusion is
drawn in Section V.
II. LOCAL REACHABILITY DENSITY BASED ON QUATERNION
A. Color Distance Based on Quaternion
A quaternion q is a four-dimensional complex number, which
can be expressed as follows:
q = s + xi + yj + zk
where s, x, y, and z are real coefficients and (i, j, k) are the three
imaginary components, which obey the following multiplicative
rules:
2
i = j 2 = k 2 = ijk = −1
. (2)
ij = −ji, jk = −kj, ki = −ik
A pixel with the color value [r, g, b]T in RGB color space can
be represented as a pure quaternion, that is, q = ri + gj + bk.
The gray line is a ray passing through the origin of the RGB
space, on which pixels have values r = g = b. Then, we can call
the pixels on the gray line as gray pixels and other pixels as color
pixels. In gray-scale images, the distance between two pixels is
defined as the difference of their gray values. A gray pixel in the
RGB space has the same visual effect as the corresponding gray
pixel in the gray-scale image space. So, the distance between
two gray pixels in the RGB space should be equal to the distance
between two corresponding gray pixels in the gray-scale image
space. That is, the distance between two color pixels q1 = x1 i +
x1 j + x1 k and q2 = x2 i + x2 j + x2 k can be calculated as
d(q1 , q2 ) = |x1 − x2| .
In the RGB space, the R, G, and B axes represent the three
primary colors. Similar to the gray line, we call the rays passing
through the origin of the RGB space, except for the gray line,
as the hue lines. Then, the plane that is perpendicular to the
gray line and passes through the origin can be regarded as √a
chromaticity plane. According to [23], if R = (i + j + k)/ 3,
RqR̄ represents a three-dimensional (3-D) rotation of color
vector q through
√ an angle of 180° about the gray line whereR̄ =
(−i − j − k)/ 3. So we can get the projection ql from the
pixel to the gray line and the projection qs from the pixel to
the chromaticity plane in a quaternion form as in the following
expression:
ql = (q + RqR̄)/2, qs = (q − RqR̄)/2.
Then, the brightness difference qdl
and chromaticity differ-
ence qds between two color pixels q1 and q2 can be expressed
as the following quaternion form:
qdl = q1l − q2l , qds = q1s − q2s
where q1land q2l
are the projections from two pixels to the gray
line, and q1s and q2s are the projections from two pixels to the
chromaticity plane.
The brightness difference and chromaticity difference are
defined as the quaternion form and we use their modules to
measure their degrees. That is, we can define the brightness
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IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO. 6, JUNE 2018
distance dl and chromaticity distance ds as in the following
formulae:
  √   √
dl = qdl  3, ds = qds  2. (6)
The two constants in (6) are used to guarantee that the maxi-
mum distance in both dl and ds is equal to 255, which is consis-
tent with the distance between two gray pixels. Obviously, if q1
is the same as q2 , both the brightness distance and chromaticity
distance are equal to zero. But if only brightness distance or
(1) only chromaticity distance is equal to zero, q1 is not always the
same as q2 . To guarantee the uniqueness of brightness distance
and chromaticity distance, we define a hue distance and add it to
both brightness distance and chromaticity distance. Every hue
line represents a hue, so we can use the angle between two hue
lines to describe the hue difference. The RGB color space is
actually a finite universe, and the minimal angle between two
hue lines is 0° and the maximum angle is 90°. If the angle is the
minimal, their hue distance should be equal to 0, which means
the two hues are the same. If the angle is the maximum, their
hue distance should be the maximum. According to these anal-
yses, we use the sine of the angle to measure the degree of hue
difference as in the following expression:
dh = w · sin(θ) (7)
where θ is the angle between two hue lines and w controls the
maximum value of hue distance. In our method, we set w = 1.
Karakos and Trahanias [12] used the multiplication operator
to combine the distance sum criterion and the angle sum criterion
to denoise a color pixel. Similarly, we also use the same operator
to combine the brightness distance and chromaticity distance
(3) and then the final formula to calculate the color distance between
two color pixels q1 and q2 is defined as
r 1 −r
d(q1 , q2 ) = (ds + dh) · (dl + dh) (8)
where r controls the importance of the chromaticity distance
and brightness distance. According to [12], we set r = 0.75.
From (8), we can see that the brightness distance is modi-
fied as the sum of brightness distance and hue distance, and
the chromaticity distance is modified as the sum of chromaticity
distance and hue distance. Thus, if the brightness distance or the
chromaticity distance is equal to zero, the hue distance will al-
ways be equal to zero because all the distances are non-negative
and then we can get that q1 is the same as q2 according to the
3-D geometrical computation.
(4)
B. Local Reachability Density for Color Images (CLRD)
We call the LRD of a color image as CLRD for convenience.
To calculate the CLRD by quaternion distance, we need to re-
view the following definitions [21]:
(5) Definition 1: k-distance of a point p:
dk (p) = max{d(p, o)|o ∈ Ω} (9)
where Ω is the k-nearest neighbors of p in a local window, and
d(p, o) denotes the distance between p and o.
Definition 2: k-distance neighborhood of a point p:
Nk (p) = {q|d(p, q) ≤ dk (p)} (10)
ZHU et al.: QUATERNION SWITCHING VECTOR MEDIAN FILTER BASED ON LOCAL REACHABILITY DENSITY 845

and |Nk (p)| denotes the number of elements in Nk (p).
Definition 3: Reachability distance of a point p to another
point o:
R Dk (p, o) = max(dk (o), d(p, o)).
Definition 4: Local reachability density of a point p:
|Nk (p)|
lrdk (p) =  . (12)
o∈N k (p) R Dk (p, o)
Finally, the CLRD of a color image can be obtained by cal-
culating the distances in (9)–(11) by (3) and (8).
III. SWITCHING VECTOR MEDIAN FILTER BASED ON CLRD
AND WEIGHTED VMF
A. Impulse Detector Based on CLRD
The CLRD of a color pixel p represents the degree of group
similarity in the neighborhood. If the CLRD is large, the p
and the pixels in its k-distance neighborhood are more likely to
belong to the same cluster, that is to say, the pixel p is noise free.
Otherwise, the smaller the CLRD, the more likely p is noisy.
Thus, we can set a threshold T to determine whether a color
pixel is noisy or not. The hard thresholding strategy can be used
as follows:
 lating CLRD are used. The window size for the WVMF is set
1 if CLRD(p) < T
N (p) = (13)
0 otherwise
where N (p) = 1 denotes the pixel p is noisy, otherwise, p is
noise free.
B. Impulse Filter Based on the Weighted VMF
If a pixel p is identified as noisy, it will be replaced by the out-
put of the WVMF. The WVMF is expressed as in the following
formula:
 noise-free pixels) and miss detection rate (MDR, the percentage
pW VM F = min wo · d(p, o)
p∈Ω
o∈Ω
where d(p, o) denotes the Euclidean distance between p and o,
and Ω denotes the filter window. Notation wo represents the
weight of pixel o, which is calculated as follows:
 
η2
wo = exp − 2 (15)
2σ
where η is the Euclidean distance from the position of o to the
center of Ω, and σ controls the weighting effect. According to
[20], we set σ = 1.6.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
A universal impulse noise model for color images is defined
as follows [24]:
 Finally, we give some enlarged image patches restored by var-
n(i, j, c), with probaility p
x(i, j, c) = (16)
o(i, j, c), with probaility 1 − p
where p is noise density and c = 1, 2, 3 denote three color chan-
nels. The more information about how to simulate the contami-
nated images by this model can be obtained in [20].
We select six images from the Categorical Image Qual-
ity Database (http://vision.okstate.edu/csiq) [25] and the im-
age retargeting subjective quality database (http://ivp.ee.cuhk.
edu.hk/projects/demo/retargeting/index.html) [26] as the test
(11) images to determine the optimal value of T . These color im-
ages include Fisher, Lady_liberty, and Monument with size 512
× 512 and Kodim03, Kodim16, and Kodim23 with size 512 ×
768. First, we change T from 0 to 0.5 with step 0.1 to get the
peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) values with p = 0.1, 0.2, 0.3.
The results showed that the optimal value of T should be smaller
than 0.2. Then, we change T from 0.01 to 0.2 with step 0.01 and
the results show that the optimal T always lies between 0.08
and 0.12. Thus, we set T = 0.1.
We choose some well-known switching methods to compare
with our method. These methods include fast peer group filter for
VMF (FPGFvmf) [13], robust switching VMF (RSVMF) [14],
fast averaging peer group filter (FAPGF) [27], edge detection-
based switching VMF (EDSVMF) [28], quaternion directional
switching VMF (QDSVMF) [17], quaternion-based switch-
ing filter (QBSF) [19], two-stage quaternion switching VMF
(TSQSVF) [20], and fuzzy two-step color filter (FTSCF) [6].
For all the methods used in the comparison, parameter settings
suggested by the reference papers are used in our experiments.
In our method, the window size of 5 × 5 and k = 3 for calcu-
as 3 × 3.
We perform these denoising methods on the six images, which
are contaminated with different levels of impulse noise ranging
from 0.05 to 0.3 in the step of 0.05. Three widely used objective
criteria for the evaluation including PSNR, structural similarity
index (SSIM) [29], and feature similarity (FSIMc) index [30]
are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
We first discuss the impulse detection accuracy of various
VFs based on the quaternion in terms of false detection rate
(FDR, the percentage of the false impulse pixels to the total
(14) of the true impulse pixels that are detected as noise free to the
total true impulse pixels). Table I lists the results with p = 0.2.
It can be seen from the table that the proposed method always
obtains a small FDR value as well as a small MDR value.
Although other methods may have smaller FDR values, their
MDR values are larger. Similarly, other methods may obtain
smaller MDR values, but their FDR values are larger. Both
the mean MDR values and the mean FDR values indicate the
following conclusions: when p = 0.1, the FDR and MDR are
0.09% and 6.60% or so; whenp = 0.2, the values of FDR and
MDR are 0.28% and 5.81% or so; when p = 0.3, the values of
FDR and MDR are 1.09% and 5.05% or so.
Then, we evaluate the restoration performance by these ob-
jective criteria. Tables II–IV illustrate the obtained results with
p = 0.2. From these results, we can see that our method achieves
the best values in terms of PSNR, FSIMc, and SSIM.
ious methods based on the quaternion with 20% impulse noise
to compare visual performance in Fig. 1. We can see that the
proposed method exhibits the best visual performance compared
to other quaternion methods. Table V shows the mean compu-
tation times of these methods performing on six images. These

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846 IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO. 6, JUNE 2018

TABLE I
FDR AND MDR VALUES OF DIFFERENT QUATERNION VECTOR FILTERS ON SIX IMAGES WITH p = 0.2

Methods FDR MDR

Pic. 1 Pic. 2 Pic. 3 Pic. 4 Pic. 5 Pic. 6 Mean Pic. 1 Pic. 2 Pic. 3 Pic. 4 Pic. 5 Pic. 6 Mean

QDSVMF 0.0017 0.0005 0.0005 0.0020 0.0001 0.0013 0.0010 0.0726 0.0715 0.0701 0.0681 0.0706 0.0694 0.0704
QBSF 0.2927 0.2670 0.2928 0.2400 0.2563 0.2564 0.2675 0.0582 0.0574 0.0567 0.0558 0.0580 0.0555 0.0569
TSQSVF 0.0041 0.0038 0.0047 0.0039 0.0004 0.0024 0.0032 0.0797 0.0733 0.0765 0.0712 0.0782 0.0725 0.0752
Proposed 0.0043 0.0017 0.0032 0.0048 0.0004 0.0026 0.0028 0.0623 0.0579 0.0579 0.0551 0.0588 0.0568 0.0581

TABLE II
PSNR VALUES FOR SIX IMAGES WITH p = 0.2

Methods PSNR

Pic. 1 Pic. 2 Pic. 3 Pic. 4 Pic. 5 Pic. 6

Noisy 13.47 13.62 12.23 13.46 13.78 13.06

FPGFvmf 25.81 25.92 22.15 26.01 25.76 25.39
RSVMF 19.79 19.89 17.87 19.87 19.96 19.56
FAPGF 29.36 28.10 24.69 30.12 28.35 29.36
EDSVMF 28.48 27.89 23.75 29.51 27.78 28.77
QDSVMF 29.39 28.79 25.61 29.82 28.44 29.93
QBSF 28.28 27.00 24.13 29.02 27.53 28.82
TSQSVF 30.27 29.42 26.29 31.15 29.69 31.21
FTSCF 28.55 28.58 24.49 28.37 27.71 27.97
Proposed 30.73 29.98 26.57 31.56 30.07 31.62

Fig. 1. Enlarged image patches of Kodim23 image restored by various quater-

nion methods with 20% impulse noise. (a) QDSVF, (b) QBSF, (c) TSQSVF,
TABLE III and (d) our proposed method.
FSIMC VALUES FOR SIX IMAGES WITH p = 0.2
TABLE V
Methods FSIMc MEAN RUNNING TIME (IN SECONDS) OF VARIOUS QUATERNION METHODS

Pic. 1 Pic. 2 Pic. 3 Pic. 4 Pic. 5 Pic. 6

Methods Image size 512 × 512 Image size 512 × 768
Noisy 0.6810 0.6297 0.7082 0.6249 0.6752 0.6018
FPGFvmf 0.9188 0.9348 0.8873 0.9239 0.9216 0.9240 p = 0.1 p = 0.2 p = 0.3 p = 0.1 p = 0.2 p = 0.3
RSVMF 0.8369 0.8189 0.8279 0.8178 0.8365 0.8039
FAPGF 0.9673 0.9680 0.9401 0.9634 0.9492 0.9753 QDSVMF 2.72 2.91 3.15 4.20 4.55 4.82
EDSVMF 0.9502 0.9608 0.9105 0.9550 0.9407 0.9659 QBSF 0.28 0.36 0.40 0.42 0.55 0.60
QDSVMF 0.9650 0.9653 0.9470 0.9593 0.9535 0.9690 TSQSVF 1.64 2.54 3.34 2.29 3.76 4.86
QBSF 0.9467 0.9463 0.9168 0.9435 0.9336 0.9563 Proposed 30.88 30.74 31.98 47.39 47.82 47.27
TSQSVF 0.9695 0.9730 0.9511 0.9685 0.9619 0.9787
FTSCF 0.9289 0.9380 0.8998 0.9249 0.9231 0.9262
Proposed 0.9717 0.9765 0.9540 0.9705 0.9633 0.9804
methods are implemented by MATLAB mixed with VC++ on
a desktop computer running 64-bit Windows 7 with 3.2 GHz
Intel Core (TM) i7-4790 CPU and 16 GB memory. It can be
seen from Table V that the proposed method takes more com-
TABLE IV
ALL THE SSIM VALUES FOR SIX IMAGES WITH p = 0.2 putation time. This is because the k-distance needs to perform
sorting operation and the CLRD is required to compute the k-
distance of each pixel in an image. A parallel implementation
Methods SSIM
strategy proposed in [31] can be used to speed up the CLRD
Pic. 1 Pic. 2 Pic. 3 Pic. 4 Pic. 5 Pic. 6 computation.
Noisy 0.0901 0.0971 0.1407 0.0738 0.0922 0.0679
FPGFvmf 0.7169 0.7204 0.6319 0.6914 0.6786 0.6757 V. CONCLUSION
RSVMF 0.3664 0.3588 0.4015 0.3289 0.3612 0.3215
FAPGF 0.8335 0.8688 0.7614 0.8512 0.7832 0.8757 This letter proposes a new quaternion distance metric to mea-
EDSVMF 0.7904 0.8208 0.6874 0.8012 0.7439 0.8006
QDSVMF 0.8236 0.8553 0.7958 0.8359 0.8010 0.8531 sure the difference between two color pixels and then combines
QBSF 0.7836 0.8205 0.7278 0.8036 0.7508 0.8244 the distance metric and LRD to construct a new impulse de-
TSQSVF 0.8462 0.8878 0.8201 0.8767 0.8327 0.8857 tector. Experimental results show that the new noise detector
FTSCF 0.7898 0.8334 0.6960 0.7836 0.7179 0.7952
Proposed 0.8643 0.9064 0.8329 0.8932 0.8504 0.9038 combined with a WVMF can obtain better results than some
other denoising methods.

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ZHU et al.: QUATERNION SWITCHING VECTOR MEDIAN FILTER BASED ON LOCAL REACHABILITY DENSITY
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