Fast Median Filter Implementation
Gregory J. Wolfe, James L. Mannos · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1979
The Tukey median filter is widely used in image processing for applications ranging from noise reduction to dropped line replacement. However, implementation of the median filter on a general-purpose computer tends to be computationally very time-consuming. This paper describes a new median filter implementation suitable for use on the video-rate "pipeline processors" provided by several commercially-available image display systems. The execution speed of the new implementation is faster than the best software implementations, depending on the median filter window size, by up to an order of magnitude. It is also independent of the image dimensions up to a 512x512 pixel size.