A novel fuzzy color median filter based on an adaptive cascade of fuzzy inference systems

Median filters are widely used for the reduction of impulse noise in digital images. Since particular problems appear for color images affected by color impulse noise (as color altering or imperfect noise elimination), many color median filtering methods are still developed. Among these, fuzzy median filters are reported to be highly efficient. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive fuzzy logic-based color filtering algorithm, designed for the hue-saturation-value (HSV) space, in the form of an adaptive cascade of fuzzy logic systems. The performance of the proposed filter is superior to other fuzzy approaches, as shown by the experimental results.