Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899

www.elsevier.com/locate/patrec

Adaptive vector median filtering

Rastislav Lukac *

Slovak Image Processing Center, Jarkova 343, Dobsina 049 25, Slovak Republic
Received 27 May 2002; received in revised form 21 November 2002

Abstract

A new adaptive vector median filtering scheme taking the advantage of the optimal filtering situation and the robust
order-statistic theory, is provided. An adaptive control is based on the set of vector-valued order-statistics with the
smallest distances to other samples in the input set.
Ó 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Multichannel image processing; Impulse noise; Impulse detection; Vector median filter; Order-statistic theory

1. Introduction channel intensities allowing Red, Green, Blue

In many image applications, an image quality
depends often on the preprocessing methods such
as noise reduction filters. In the environments
corrupted by impulse noise, bit errors and outliers,
the most popular non-linear filters are based on
the robust order-statistic theory (Pitas and Ve-
netsanopoulos, 1990), where a well-known median
filter takes a great popularity. With a sample or-
dering, atypical image samples such as outliers, are
moved to borders of the ordered set and the me-
dian value is the noise-free sample with the largest
probability in comparison with other samples
present in the input set.
When impulse noise affects multichannel or
color images, the input set spawned by a filter
window represents the set of vectors of color
*
Tel.: +421-903-639-189.
E-mail address: lukacr@ieee.org (R. Lukac).
color channels. In order to preserve the inherent
correlation that exists between color channels, the
vector filtering algorithms are preferred. Pitas and
Tsakalides (1991), Tang et al. (1995), Plataniotis
and Venetsanopoulos (2000), Smolka et al. (2001)
referred to a variety of ordering criteria (e.g. dis-
tance measures and similarity measures) for mul-
tichannel samples.
Astola et al. (1990) introduced the reference and
probably the most popular vector filter called
vector median minimizing the sum of vector dis-
tances with other input multichannel samples. The
vector median is characterized by robust estimates
in environments with impulse noise or bit errors,
excellent impulse noise attenuation capability and
convergence to root signals. The smoothing func-
tion of the vector median filter (VMF) is designed
to perform the fixed amount of smoothing. It may
become the undesired property and in some image
areas the VMF will introduce too much smoothing
and it will blur thin details and image edges. For

0167-8655/03/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0167-8655(03)00016-3
1890 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899

that reason, many works such as Bardos and where c represents the selected norm, e.g. absolute
Sangwine (1997), Plataniotis and Venetsanopoulos (c ¼ 1), Euclidean (c ¼ 2), etc. The quantification
(2000), Lukac (2001, 2002a,b,c) and Smolka et al. of the distance between two m-channel samples
(2002a,b), etc. have provided some ideas how to xi ¼ ðxi1 ; xi2 ; . . . ; xim Þ and xj ¼ ðxj1 ; xj2 ; . . . ; xjm Þ
minimize the undesired effect of the vector median given by the expression kxi xj kc follows from the
filtering using fuzzy logic, noise density approxi- generalized Minkowski metric (Plataniotis and
mations, subfilters and restrictions imposed on the Venetsanopoulos, 2000) defined by
central sample, etc. !1=c
X m
This paper focuses on a new simpler algorithm kxi xj kc ¼ jxik xjk j
c
ð2Þ
based on the set of the smallest vector order sta- k¼1
tistics. Besides the computational simplicity, the
proposed method holds excellent detection and where c characterizes the used norm, m is the di-
estimation capability and after the optimization mension of vectors and xik is the kth element of xi .
the proposed method outperforms standard vector If distance measures L1 ; L2 ; . . . ; LN serve as an
filtering schemes in terms of used objective criteria. ordering criterion, i.e.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Lð1Þ 6 Lð2Þ 6 6 LðrÞ 6 6 LðN Þ ð3Þ
Section 2, the basic description of the vector me-
it means that the same ordering is implied to the
dian filtering is presented. Section 3 focuses on the
input set x1 ; x2 ; . . . ; xN which results in ordered
proposed adaptive VMF, where the adaptive be-
input sequence
havior is based on the set of the smallest vector
order-statistics. In Section 4, the analysis of the xð1Þ 6 xð2Þ 6 6 xðrÞ 6 6 xðN Þ ð4Þ
proposed method in the dependence on the filter
parameters and the probability of impulse noise The sample xð1Þ 2 W associated with the mini-
appearing in the filter input is provided. This sec- mum vector distance Lð1Þ constitutes an output of
tion also contains a number of test and filtered the well-known VMF introduced by Astola et al.
images, tables and descriptions of objective criteria (1990). Equivalently, the VMF output of the set
and noise model for vector-valued signals. Finally, x1 ; x2 ; . . . ; xN is defined as the sample xVMF 2
main ideas, advantages and results are summa- fx1 ; x2 ; . . . ; xN g that satisfies the following ex-
rized in Section 5. pression:
X
N X
N
kxVMF xi k c 6 kxj xi k c
i¼1 i¼1
2. Vector median filtering
for j ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; N ð5Þ
l m
Let yðxÞ : Z ! Z represent a multichannel where c characterizes the used norm.
image, where l is an image dimension and m
characterizes a number of color channels. In the
case of standard color images, parameters l and m
3. Proposed method
are equal to 2 and 3, respectively. Let W ¼
fxi 2 Z l ; i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; N g represent a filter window
The fixed amount of smoothing performed by
of a finite size N , where x1 ; x2 ; . . . ; xN is a set of
the VMF often results in the objectionable blur-
noisy samples the central sample xðN þ1Þ=2 deter-
ring of edges and image details. For that reason,
mines the position of the filter window. Let us
the common problem is how to preserve some
consider that each input vector xi is associated
desired signal features while the noise elements are
with the distance measure
removed. An optimal situation would arise if the
X
N filter could be designed so that the desired features
Li ¼ kxi xj k c for i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; N ð1Þ were invariant to the filtering operation and only
j¼1 noise would be affected. This requirement is sat-
 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899
isfied by the alternation between the VMF and the
identity operation (no smoothing provided) in the
dependence on the decision rule expressed as fol-
lows:
IF Val P Tol THEN xðN þ1Þ=2 is impulse
ð6Þ
ELSE xðN þ1Þ=2 is noise-free
where Val characterizes a detector operation based
on a simple mathematical relationship between the
central sample and neighboring samples and Tol is
a threshold value. If the operation value Val is
greater than or equal to the threshold value Tol,
the central sample xðN þ1Þ=2 is probably corrupted
and it will be processed by VMF. If Val is smaller
than Tol, the central sample xðN þ1Þ=2 is probably
noise-free and it remains unchanged. This idea
constrains the filter influence in terms of the rela-
tionship between VMF and atypical samples and
significantly reduces the estimation error of the
output image.
The general problem how to achieve the opti-
mal filtering situation, has been a subject in the
recent works, e.g. Beghdadi and Khellaf (1997),
Bardos et al. (1997), Chen et al. (1999), Chen and
Wu (2001), Lukac (2001, 2002a,b,c) and Smolka
et al. (2002a,b). In these works, the adaptive
switching between the smoothing filter and the
identity operation has been controlled by an ad-
ditional filter stage detecting impulses. In some
situations, this solution can increase implementa-
tion requirements, especially when the impulse
detection algorithm is based on different opera-
tions than that of the filtering function. For that
reason, it is desirable to detect and filter impulses
using the same mathematical base.
In this paper, the proposed method utilizes
practically the same set of operations such as the
VMF filtering scheme, setting out from the rela-
tionship between the sample ordering and the
outliers or atypical samples present in the input
set. Clearly, the computational complexity of the
proposed method is very attractive. The lowest
ranked sample, i.e. the VMF output, and their
closest neighborhoods hold similar values of the
distance measure computed to other input sam-
ples. Thus, we determine the operation value Val
as the vector distance between the central sample
xðN þ1Þ=2 and the mean of the first r vector order-
1891
statistics xð1Þ ; xð2Þ ; . . . ; xðrÞ associated with the
smallest distances Lð1Þ ; Lð2Þ ; . . . ; LðrÞ , for r 6 N .
Mathematically, the operation value Val is given
by
 
 1X r 
 ðiÞ 
Val ¼ xðN þ1Þ=2 x  ð7Þ
 r i¼1 
c
In the case of the noise detection, i.e. Val P Tol,
the noisy central sample xðN þ1Þ=2 is replaced with
the sample xð1Þ (given by Eq. (4)) corresponding
to the VMF output. If Val < Tol, then the central
sample xðN þ1Þ=2 is probably noise-free, no addi-
tional processing is performed and the central
sample constitutes the filter output. Since the set
xð1Þ ; xð2Þ ; . . . ; xðrÞ includes r input samples with the
highest similarity to the input set, it gives a good
measure of the noise corruption of the central
sample. In order to achieve high performance of
the proposed method, the optimization of the pa-
rameter r and the threshold value Tol is carried
out. Note that for Tol ¼ 0 the proposed method is
equivalent to the standard VMF definition.
4. Simulation results
The question related to the proposed method is
the dependence of its performance on parameters
Tol, r and the degree of the impulse noise cor-
ruption pv . These parameters significantly influ-
ence the behavior of the proposed method and its
detection characteristics.
The original test images (Fig. 1a and b) have
been corrupted by the impulse noise (Fig. 1c) ex-
pressed as

v with probability pv
xi;j ¼ ð8Þ
oi;j with probability 1 pv
where i, j characterize the sample position, oi;j is
the original sample, xi;j represents the sample from
the noisy image, pv is a corruption probability and
v ¼ ðvR ; vG ; vB Þ is a noise vector of intensity ran-
dom values. Note that the considered degree of the
impulse noise corruption pv has ranged from 0 to
0.3 with the fixed stepsize 0.01.
To evaluate the achieved results, objective
criteria such as mean absolute error (MAE),
1892 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899
mean square error (MSE) and normalized color
difference (NCD) that reflect the signal-detail
preservation, the noise suppression and color
chromaticity preservation, each separately, have
been used. Mathematically, the MAE and the
MSE are given by
1 XN X M
MAE ¼ joi;j xi;j j ð9Þ
NM i¼1 j¼1
1 XN X M
2 capability done by pure directional processing. In
MSE ¼ ðoi;j xi;j Þ ð10Þ
NM i¼1 j¼1
where foi;j g is the original image, fxi;j g is the fil-
tered (noisy) image, i, j are indices of the sample
position and N , M characterize image size. In the
case of color images, these criteria are computed as
the mean over color channels.
The NCD described by Plataniotis and Ve-
netsanopoulos (2000), expresses well the measure
of the color distortion. The NCD is defined by
PN PM qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
1
NM i¼1 j¼1 ðLoi;j Lxi;j Þ2 þ ðuoi;j uxi;j Þ2 þ ðvoi;j vxi;j Þ2
NCD ¼ PN PM qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
1
NM i¼1 j¼1 ðLoi;j Þ2 þ ðuoi;j Þ2 þ ðvoi;j Þ2
where i, j are indices of the sample position, N , M
characterize an image size and Loi;j , uoi;j , voi;j and Lxi;j ,
uxi;j , vxi;j are values of the perceived lightness and
two representatives of chrominance related to the
original image sample oi;j and the noisy image
sample xi;j , respectively.
Besides objective criteria, very important are
subjective criteria, especially when results are ob-
served by human visual system. In order to em-
phasize the difference between filter performance,
Figs. 1 and 2 show the filter output along with
their corresponding estimation error emphasized
by the factor 2.5. Note that images and estimation
errors shown in Figs. 1d–f and 2 are related to the
filtering of Fig. 1c that illustrates the impulse noise
corruption of the impulse probability pv ¼ 0:1.
The performance of the proposed method is
compared with well-known vector standards such
as the VMF, the basic vector directional filter
(BVDF) described by Plataniotis et al. (1998) and
the directional distance filter (DDF) presented by
Karakos and Trahanias (1997). The VMF output
is shown in Fig. 1e. It is observed that the VMF
excellently suppresses impulses in the image,
however some edges and image details are blurred
especially on transitions between objects. This
undesired filter behavior is more visible in Fig. 1f
corresponding to the estimation error of the VMF.
In the case of the BVDF, the increased estimation
error (Fig. 2b) is caused by a worse estimation
some situations, the decreased noise attenuation
capability of the BVDF can result in the presence
of impulses in the resulting image. This fact is
shown in Fig. 2a. The DDF output (Fig. 2c) is
characterized again by excellent noise suppression.
Since the DDF combines the properties of both
VMF and BVDF, it reduces the edge jitter. Thus,
the DDF output is characterized by smaller esti-
mation error (Fig. 2d) in comparison with previ-
ous standard filters. Finally, the output of the
ð11Þ
proposed method and their corresponding esti-
mation error are shown in Fig. 2e and f, respec-
tively. Note that the parameters were set as r ¼ 5
and Tol ¼ 60. The output of the proposed method
shows the excellent signal-detail preservation with
the simultaneous impulse noise suppression. The
significant balance between these important image
filtering tasks results in a very small estimation
error (Fig. 2f).
Since the structure of the proposed method is
characterized by parameters r and Tol, it is very
interesting to observe how the performance and
the overall behavior of the proposed method de-
pend on these parameters. The results shown in the
Fig. 3a are related to the test image Lena cor-
rupted by 10% impulse noise, i.e. the impulse
probability pv is equal to 0.1. Fig. 3b illustrates the
filter behavior related to the test image Peppers
and 20% impulse noise (pv ¼ 0:2). Note that the
darkest fields show the minimum values of error
 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899 1893

Fig. 1. Experimental results: (a) original image Peppers; (b) original image Lena; (c) impulse noise (pv ¼ 0:1); (d) absolute error of
noisy image; (e) output of VMF; (f) estimation error of VMF.

Fig. 2. Experimental results: (a) output of BVDF; (b) estimation error of BVDF; (c) output of DDF; (d) estimation error of DDF; (e)
output of the proposed method with r ¼ 5 and Tol ¼ 60; (f) estimation error of the proposed method with r ¼ 5 and Tol ¼ 60.
1894 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899

Fig. 3. Dependence of used error criteria related to the proposed method on parameters Tol and r. (a) Test image Lena with pv ¼ 0:1;
(b) test image Peppers with pv ¼ 0:2.

criteria. The best results are achieved for the shown in Fig. 4. In the case of parameter r,
threshold value Tol ¼ 60. These results are better the most appropriate value is r ¼ 5. The optimal
 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899 1895

1.05 1.94
MAE MAE
1.92
r=1 r=1
r=3 r=3
1 r=5 1.9 r=5
r=7 r=7
r=9 1.88 r=9

0.95 1.86

1.84

0.9 1.82

1.8

0.85 1.78

1.76

0.8 1.74
50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80
Tol Tol

38 74
MSE MSE
36 r=1 72
r=1
r=3 r=3
r=5 r=5
34 r=7 r=7
70
r=9 r=9
32
68
30
66
28

64
26

24 62

22 60
50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80
Tol Tol

0.0125 0.0245
NCD NCD
0.012 r=1 r=1
r=3 r=3
r=5 0.024 r=5
0.0115 r=7 r=7
r=9 r=9
0.011
0.0235

0.0105

0.023
0.01

0.0095
0.0225
0.009

0.0085 0.022
50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80
(a) Tol (b) Tol

Fig. 4. Selected details of achieved results shown in Fig. 3. (a) Test image Lena with pv ¼ 0:1; (b) test image Peppers with pv ¼ 0:2.
1896 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899
1 1
normalized
magnitude
MAE
0.99
MSE
NCD
0.98
0.97
0.96
0.95
0.94
0.93
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
(a)
Fig. 5. Dependence of the performance of the proposed method with the chosen threshold parameter Tol ¼ 60 on the parameter r: (a)
Test image Lena with pv ¼ 0:1; (b) test image Peppers with pv ¼ 0:2.
parameter r is important because of two aspects.
The first one is reduction of the computational
complexity of the proposed method. The second
aspect reflects the removing of extreme samples
with the largest differences from the input set,
where these samples represent often the noise. Fig.
5 is related to the proposed method with the
threshold value Tol ¼ 60 and it shows the depen-
dence of normalized error criteria on the parame-
ter r. For r ¼ 5, 6, 7, the performance of the
proposed method is relatively comparable, espe-
cially in the term of MSE and NCD. Another in-
creasing of r increases dramatically all objective
criteria. This fact is demonstrated in Fig. 5b.
Because the choice of optimal filter parameters
is always accompanied with unknown filter ro-
bustness, Fig. 6 demonstrates the comparison be-
tween the proposed method and the relevant
vector filters. These results show excellent robust-
ness of the proposed method in terms of used
objective criteria. Some numerical results are also
presented in Tables 1–4, where the performance of
the above-mentioned methods is also compared
with some adaptive filtering algorithms such as
adaptive vector directional filter (AVDF) provided
by Plataniotis et al. (1998), self-adaptive algorithm
(SAA) provided by Smolka et al. (2002a) and
modified weighted vector median (MWVM) pro-
vided by Smolka et al. (2002b). In many situations,
the performance of the proposed method is com-
normalized
magnitude
MAE
0.995
MSE
NCD
0.99
0.985
0.98
0.975
0.97
0.965
9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
r (b) r
parable with the SAA. In the case of low amount
of observed impulses, the SAA can achieve better
results than the proposed method. On the other
hand, the performance of the SAA significantly
decreases with the increased noise corruption,
whereas the proposed method still guarantees ex-
cellent results. In addition, the computational
complexity of the proposed method is significantly
less in comparison with more complex SAA and
thus, the proposed method is more computation-
ally attractive for real image applications.
5. Conclusions
A new method for impulse noise suppression
and outliers rejection in multichannel images has
been described and analyzed. The proposed
method is based on the adaptive alternation be-
tween the standard VMF and the identity opera-
tion. The proposed method takes the largest
advantages of the optimal filtering situation and
the robust order-statistic theory and it is designed
to reduce the blurring of image details, usually
introduced by standard vector median. Since the
proposed adaptive vector median is controlled by
the set of the smallest vector-order statistics and
these lowest ranked vectors are produced by the
sample ordering scheme necessary in the determi-
nation of the VMF output, the computational
 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899 1897

6 7
MAE MAE
6
5

5
4

4
3
VMF 3
BVDF VMF
2 DDF BVDF
proposed method 2 DDF
proposed method
1
1

0 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
pv pv

200 350
MSE MSE
300
160 VMF VMF
BVDF BVDF
140 DDF 250 DDF
proposed method proposed method
120
200
100
150
80

60 100

40
50
20

0 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
pv pv

0.06 0.08
NCD NCD
0.07
0.05

0.06

0.04
0.05

0.03 0.04
VMF VMF
BVDF 0.03 BVDF
0.02 DDF DDF
proposed method proposed method
0.02

0.01
0.01

0 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30

(a) pv (b) pv

Fig. 6. Performance of the proposed method (Tol ¼ 60 and r ¼ 5) and the standard vector filters expressed through MAE, MSE and
NCD in the dependence on the degree of the impulse noise corruption pv . (a) Test image Lena; (b) test image Peppers.
1898 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899

Table 1
Comparison of the presented algorithms using original images pv ¼ 0
Image Lena Peppers
Method MAE MSE NCD MAE MSE NCD
VMF 3.190 45.4 0.03816 2.885 36.7 0.04111
BVDF 3.605 52.7 0.03870 3.458 50.2 0.04031
DDF 3.288 46.8 0.03812 2.907 37.5 0.03965
AVDF 4.112 50.2 0.04698 3.853 44.8 0.05248
SAA 0.064 3.7 0.00029 0.068 4.2 0.00028
MWVM 1.521 29.4 0.01642 1.255 20.8 0.01518
Proposed method 0.169 8.8 0.00105 0.172 9.8 0.00105

Table 2
Comparison of the presented algorithms using impulse noise corruption pv ¼ 0:05
Image Lena Peppers
Method MAE MSE NCD MAE MSE NCD
Identity 3.762 427.3 0.04450 3.988 486.1 0.04414
VMF 3.430 50.8 0.04031 3.169 43.9 0.04520
BVDF 3.818 58.6 0.04073 3.740 60.7 0.04378
DDF 3.509 52.3 0.04023 3.182 44.6 0.04309
AVDF 4.301 54.3 0.04834 4.068 51.4 0.05522
SAA 0.524 15.8 0.00494 0.526 17.5 0.00510
MWVM 1.312 30.1 0.01583 1.205 23.9 0.01440
Proposed method 0.518 17.1 0.00522 0.514 18.5 0.00558

Table 3
Comparison of the presented algorithms using impulse noise corruption pv ¼ 0:10
Image Lena Peppers
Method MAE MSE NCD MAE MSE NCD
Identity 7.312 832.0 0.08401 7.677 943.3 0.08696
VMF 3.687 56.5 0.04285 3.503 55.0 0.04935
BVDF 4.099 67.6 0.04321 4.151 82.7 0.04844
DDF 3.733 57.3 0.04240 3.512 56.6 0.04749
AVDF 4.540 59.5 0.05029 4.370 61.6 0.05946
SAA 0.834 24.6 0.00901 0.899 25.4 0.01043
MWVM 1.453 31.3 0.01521 1.279 28.6 0.01516
Proposed method 0.838 24.1 0.00886 0.901 30.5 0.01085

Table 4
Comparison of the presented algorithms using impulse noise corruption pv ¼ 0:20
Image Lena Peppers
Method MAE MSE NCD MAE MSE NCD
Identity 14.019 1604.6 0.16252 14.912 1832.0 0.16938
VMF 4.335 80.3 0.04924 4.232 85.7 0.06008
BVDF 4.859 107.8 0.04987 5.111 152.9 0.06024
DDF 4.321 78.8 0.04834 4.254 90.4 0.05796
AVDF 5.258 80.4 0.05722 5.226 98.3 0.07394
SAA 1.730 70.6 0.02158 1.799 73.2 0.02283
MWVM 1.847 52.5 0.01979 1.785 57.2 0.02264
Proposed method 1.689 52.3 0.01883 1.764 63.6 0.02260
 R. Lukac / Pattern Recognition Letters 24 (2003) 1889–1899
complexity of the proposed method is still com-
parable with its non-adaptive form. The achieved
results show excellent properties of the new ap-
proach in terms of objective quality measures. The
proposed method outperforms the standard vector
filters such as VMF, BVDF and DDF and
achieves significant improvement in comparison
with these widely used vector filtering schemes.
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