An Efficient Color-Impulse Detector and its Application to Color Images

By analyzing quaternion rotation theory, the color difference between two color pixels can be represented in quaternion form. Based on this representation of color difference, an efficient color-impulse detector for switching vector median filters is presented. Extensive simulations indicate that the proposed algorithm provides a significant improvement over many of the existing vector filtering techniques in suppressing impulses with different noise ratios. In particular, the proposed approach effectively preserves the fine thin lines and other detail features. The low computational complexity is also one of its advantages