Hardware and Software Implementation of Median Filter in Image Processing Application

Noising is important part of Image Processing. The existence of Impulse noise in an acquired image is most common problem. Median filter has ability to remove Impulse noise and preserve edges of an image. It is a computationally intensive operation, so processing time of median filter software algorithm is considerably more. Therefore, to meet the real-time filtering requirements, fast hardware based Median filter is used. In this work, median filter is implemented on FPGA and filter quality in terms of Signal-to-noise ratio is measured for several 256 x 256 color (RGB) images.