An application of median filters to digital television

The properties of the median filter can be used to great advantage in the improvement of television images corrupted with "sparklie" noise. In this paper we describe the application of the median filter to a five second noisy movie sequence received from a satellite antenna with a weak signal. The sequence of two dimensional TV images is decomposed into a set of one dimensional signals. Each one dimensional signal consists of the succession of values a fixed picture element (pixel) takes as successive frames arrive for display. The median filter is applied separately to each of these one dimensional signals. It is shown that the portion of TV frames not containing noise almost always appears as a root signal to the median filter. Finally a real time implementation of the filtering scheme is proposed.