An application specific processor for implementing stack filters

Stack filters which are a generalization of the rank-order filters, have great practical importance in image processing. Work reported in this paper is based on the new realization that stack filter can be implemented without undergoing threshold decomposition (i.e., complexity of implementation increases linearly with the precision of the input data). The authors have presented the design of a specialized processor which implements all window-width-three stack filters with a precision of eight. This kind of programmable filter can be highly useful especially in fields like biomedical instrumentation, image processing, speech processing and communication systems