Color-scale morphological filters with multiple structuring elements

With the wide use of color in many areas, the interest on the color perception and processing has been growing rapidly. An important topic in color image processing is the development of efficient tools capable of filtering images without blurring them and without changing their original chromatic contents. In this paper, a new technique reducing noise of color image is developed. A class of color-scale morphological operations is introduced, which extend mathematical morphology to color image processing, representing a color image as a vector function. The correlation between color components is utilized to perform noise removal. Color-scale morphological filters with multiple structuring elements (CSMF-MSEs) are proposed. Their properties are discussed and proved. Experimental results show that CSMF-MSEs are suitable and powerful to eliminate noise and preserve edges in color image because of efficient utilization of inherent correlation between color components, and they perform better than vector median filter.