Vector morphological operators in HSV color space

In HSV color space, the current vector morphological operators have low capability to reduce color noise caused by hue and saturation in color image processing. Because they sort the color pixels according to the hierarchical ordering of V, S, H, which is against the equal principle of the three channels in color image processing. A novel vector ordering based on the combination of H, S and V is proposed in this paper, and the associated vector morphological erosion, dilation and composite filtering operators are defined. Compared with the popular vector morphological operators, experimental results show that the new operators can reduce the color noise effectively without any new color pixels while preserving the image details. And the filtered images have higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and lower mean absolute error (MSE).