534
4, APRIL 2004
A New Class of Chromatic Filters for Color Image
Processing. Theory and Applications
Luca Lucchese, Member, IEEE, and Sanjit K. Mitra, Life Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—This paper advances a new framework for chromatic
filtering of color images. The chromatic content of a color image
is encoded in the CIE chromaticity coordinates whereas the
achromatic content is encoded as CIE tristimulus value. Within
the chromaticity diagram, colors are added according to the
well-known center of gravity law of additive color mixtures, which
is generalized here into a nonlinear filtering scheme for processing
the two chromatic signals and . The achromatic channel
can be processed with traditional filtering schemes, either
linear or nonlinear, depending on the specific task at hand. The
most interesting characteristics of the new filtering scheme are:
1) the elimination of color smearing effects along edges between
bright and dark areas; 2) the possibility of processing chromatic
components in a noniterative fashion through linear convolution
operations; and 3) the consequent amenability to computationally
efficient implementations with fast Fourier transform. The paper
includes several examples with both synthetic and real images
where the performance of the new filtering method is compared
with that of other color image processing algorithms.
Index Terms—Center of gravity law of additive color mixtures,
chromatic and achromatic signals, chromatic filtering, CIE
and tristimulus coordinates, CIE and chromaticity
diagrams, image denoising, isotropic and anisotropic diffusion.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE LITERATURE of image processing offers a variety of
well-established methods, both linear and nonlinear, for
filtering monochrome or gray-level images. Color image fil-
tering, on the other hand, has started receiving attention only
in recent years. The early approaches consisted in straightfor-
ward applications of scalar algorithms to each one of the three
components or channels in which a color image can be decom-
posed. Since these channels have, in general, different contrast,
proper measures have to be taken in order to prevent possible
chromatic shifts. The important inter-channel interactions can
be taken into account by processing all three components in a
vector fashion [1], [2].
Filtering is often used as a synonym of denoising because its
objective is to separate, and possibly enhance, the signal of in-
Manuscript received May 17, 2001; revised August 20, 2003. This work was
supported in part by a University of California MICRO grant with matching
supports from National Semiconductor Corporation, Lucent Technologies, and
Philips Research Laboratories, and in part by Microsoft Corporation. The as-
sociate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for
publication was Dr. Nicolas Rougon.
L. Lucchese is with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331 USA (e-mail:
luca@eecs.orst.edu).
S. K. Mitra is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA (e-mail: mitra@
ece.ucsb.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIP.2003.822609
1057-7149/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 13, NO.
terest from what is considered, in a broad sense, noise. In the
case of color images, the preservation of finely textured details
coupled with the necessity of preserving chromatic informa-
tion rules out the possibility of using linear filtering techniques.
The attention has therefore been primarily focused on nonlinear
color image processing of vector data where a number of tech-
niques have been advanced.
The ranked-order filters use the direction or magnitude of
color vectors. The vector median filter (VMF) [3] is one of the
first examples of this class of operators and has inspired various
other techniques. This kind of filter performs well in removing
impulse noise but is outperformed by arithmetic (linear) mean
filtering in removing additive white Gaussian noise; a compro-
mise between the two is offered by the -trimmed VMF [4].
The vector directional filters (VDFs) [5], [6] use the angular dis-
tance between color pixels as the filtering criterion; VDFs per-
form well if the magnitude (or intensity) information has little
importance. If this is not the case, generalized vector directional
filters (GVDFs) should be used instead; they separate the pro-
cessing of vector-valued images into (vector) directional pro-
cessing and (scalar) magnitude processing. The first operation
aims at filtering the chromatic content of the color image while
avoiding chromaticity shifts; the second operation is cascaded
to the first and aims at denoising the image intensity. The di-
rectional-distance filters (DDFs) [7] represent a generalization
of VMFs and VDFs, and are based on the joint minimization of
the cost functions defining these two classes of operators. DDFs
inherit from VDFs the property of chromatic preservation and
are robust signal estimators under various noise distributions.
Also, the hybrid directional filters (HDFs) [8] combine the or-
dering criteria of VMFs and VDFs. The HDFs, however, operate
on the magnitude and direction of the vector data independently
and then nonlinearly combine the results to produce the output.
There exist various other types of ranked-order filters such as
the min/max vector filters, the -vector estimators, and all the
multivariate data ordering schemes based on marginal, condi-
tional, partial, and reduced ordering of vectors [1], [2].
Locally adaptive filters are also widely used in color image
processing and appear to outperform nonadaptive methods [1].
Adaptivity can be implemented in various ways: for instance,
by using data-dependent filter coefficients or by employing
gradient-driven smoothing operators. Excellent examples of
adaptive design of the first kind are provided by the adap-
tive nearest-neighbor filters (ANNFs) and by the adaptive
nearest-neighbor multichannel filters (ANNMFs), comprehen-
sively reviewed in [9].
LUCCHESE AND MITRA: A NEW CLASS OF CHROMATIC FILTERS FOR COLOR IMAGE PROCESSING. THEORY AND APPLICATIONS
The adaptive filters of the second kind are instead usually
obtained with a scale-space representation where the output
image is the result of a diffusion process described by partial
differential equations (PDEs). This approach has become very
popular after the seminal works of Witkin [10], and of Perona
and Malik [11], respectively, on scale-space representation
and on anisotropic diffusion of scalar images. The idea of
extending anisotropic diffusion to vector-valued signals such
as color images finds its roots in the work of Whitaker and
Gerig [12]. Weickert [13] has further elaborated on this idea by
adding local texture analysis so as to encourage diffusion along
preferred image structure orientations. Sapiro and co-workers
have made extensive contributions to PDE-based color image
filtering [14]–[18]. In the context of this paper, the color
enhancement technique presented in [18] and based on the
theory of harmonic maps in liquid cristals [17], is of particular
interest: the magnitude of the channels of a color image
encodes brightness or intensity and is processed with scalar
median filtering or anisotropic diffusion; the direction of the
vectors encodes chromaticity and is filtered with a
system of coupled (either isotropic or anisotropic) diffusion
equations. Even though chromatic information is intrinsically
two-dimensional (2-D), in the filtering scheme of [18] it is
considered as a unit-norm three-dimensional (3-D) vector
whence three coupled PDEs have to be solved in parallel. In
[19] and [20], color images are considered as 2-D Riemannian
surfaces embedded in five-dimensional (5-D) Riemannian
manifolds (two spatial dimensions plus three color coordi-
nates). Within this image representation, denoising is obtained
by solving a family of PDEs related to the Beltrami flow. The
enhancement and denoising algorithm of [21] is based on the
same framework, where color images are processed with a
forward-and-backward adaptive (FAB) diffusion process. A
FAB diffusion is also used by Smolka et al. in [22] for color
image enhancement. Boccignone et al. [23] model instead the
interactions among different color channels through the theory
of thermodynamics of open systems and derive a generalized
diffusion equation which determines the evolution of the color
image in a spatio-chromatic scale space.
Both the ranked-order filters and the PDE-based filters are
computationally intensive. The former have a high computa-
tional complexity because of the large number of operations
necessary for evaluating and ranking “distances” between
vectors; the latter require iterative methods for solving PDEs
and provide the end result after several iterations. Various other
methods have been proposed for filtering color images; they
are noiterative and, as such, require a much lower burden in
terms of computations. A noteworthy example is provided by
the bilateral filtering [24] which combines domain and range
filtering: this class of linear operators is based on convolutional
kernels weighting both spatial proximity (domain filtering)
and colorimetric similarity (range filtering). Another example
is represented by the color mode filtering advanced by van
de Weijer and Gevers and based on the modes, or maxima, of
local color histograms at various scales [25]. Sangwine and
co-workers [26]–[29] have instead extended the Fourier anal-
535
ysis to color images by using the three imaginary components
of quaternions to encode the color channels. Based on this new
framework, they have advanced linear operators for computing
convolution and correlation of color images [28], [29].
There exists another important category of color image fil-
tering algorithms which consider color information as made up
of a 2-D chromatic channel and a one-dimensional (1-D) achro-
matic channel. This way of representing color finds its rationale
in modern theories on human color vision; psychophysical ev-
idence seems, in fact, to suggest that spatial frequency, and
therefore image structure, is analyzed separately along two
distinct pathways, one operating on luminance signals and the
other on chromatic signals [30]. Examples of this alternative
approach to color image processing are provided by the work
on the frequency-domain representation of chromatic infor-
mation by Thornton and Sangwine [31] and by McCabe et
al. [32]. Lucchese and Mitra have elaborated on the concept
of complex chromaticity of [31], [32] by advancing a new
scheme for its filtering through anisotropic diffusion [33].
Also, the work of this paper, originally presented in
[34]–[36], belongs to the latter category, since we advance a
new noniterative scheme for filtering the 2-D chromatic content
of color images. The 1-D achromatic channel is processed
independently with traditional scalar filtering techniques but,
at the same time, provides important information for the
chromatic filtering. Our scheme is inspired by the additive
color mixtures within chromaticity diagrams and exploits the
different distribution of spatial frequencies between achromatic
and chromatic channels [30]. While the former encodes most
of the spatial structure of natural images and, therefore, has to
be processed with filters capable of retaining high-frequency
components, the latter have a much narrower bandwidth and
can then be processed with more selective filters.
In our scheme, color images are represented in the
space, where the first two components are the CIE chro-
maticity coordinates and the third is the CIE tristimulus value
[37], [38]. Within the CIE chromaticity diagram, colors are
mixed by means of the center of gravity law of additive color
mixtures [37], [38]. From this well-known result, we derive a
new filtering scheme for processing the chromatic content of
color images. The -filter and -filter we propose are, in fact,
generalizations of the equations for computing the chromaticity
coordinates and of additive color mixtures; our original
contribution consists in a new interpretation of these equations
where spatial filtering is combined with color mixing to create
a simple and effective framework for chromatic filtering. In this
paper, we discuss the remarkable properties of the new scheme
with both synthetic and real images and show that for denoising
applications it represents a very attractive alternative, both in
terms of objective and subjective results and in terms of compu-
tational efficiency, to ranked-order filters and PDE-based filters.
The outline of the paper is as follows. Section II introduces
color mixtures in the CIE and color spaces and in
the CIE and chromaticity diagrams. Section III presents
the new chromatic filtering scheme. Section IV reports some ex-
perimental results with synthetic and real images and compares
536 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 13, NO. 4, APRIL 2004

the performance of the new scheme against those of other repre-

sentative methods for image denoising. Section V contains the
conclusions.

II. COLOR MIXTURES

A. Additive Mixtures in the CIE and Color Spaces
A 3-D orthogonal Cartesian coordinate system represents the
most natural way of graphically representing the red, green, and
blue components of a color image. This 3-D vector space, com-
monly referred to as the color space,1 can be thought of as
a cube because, for physical constraints, the , , and coor-
dinates are restricted to the range [0,1]. The cube, repre-
senting the color gamut of the acquisition or display device, will
be denoted as , where “ ” denotes the
Cartesian product of sets. Within , the additive mixture of two
colors can be modeled as follows: let
Fig. 1. Additive mixture of two colors C and C in RGB coordinates
and be the two colors to be mixed. through the convex combination C = C 0   C
C + (1 )C , 0  1.
Their mixture gives a third color is the RGB color gamut.

(1)
or, in a vector notation, . Equation (1)
expresses as the convex combination of and , which
guarantees that the end result belongs to gamut . A geo-
metric interpretation of this operation is shown in Fig. 1; the
resulting color lies on the segment linking the two original
colors and at a location which depends on the relative
amounts of the mixing components.
The colors , can be converted to CIE
tristimulus values through a 3-D affine transformation
[37], [38]. For simplicity, in this paper we assume that the
coordinates of an image refer to the device-independent CIE
space, which leads to the following affine transformation
[37]:
Fig. 2. Additive mixture of two colors K and K in XY Z coordinates
through the convex combination K = K 0
K + (1 )K , 0  1.  
K is the XY Z color gamut.

the space the mixture of two colors is expressed by their

(2) convex combination according to the same weights.
It can be noticed that, since all the rows of matrix sum up to B. Additive Mixtures in the CIE Chromaticity Space
unity, (2) maps the cubic gamut of the physically representable
In many applications it is more convenient to represent the
colors in CIE coordinates into the gamut , having
relative amounts of the tristimulus values rather than their abso-
the shape of a parallelepiped, in the reference system (see
lute amounts. In the case of the CIE tristimulus coordi-
Fig. 2). Moreover, the combination of (1) and (2) yields
nates, this is accomplished by computing the so-called CIE
chromaticity coordinates [37] as
(3)
(4a)

or, in a vector notation, . It follows (4b)

that, by the virtue of the linearity of the operation in (2), also in
which can be compactly written as . Fig. 3
1The RGB color space can be either device-dependent or device-independent
(e.g., the CIE RGB color space), depending on the set of primaries to which shows a sketch of the CIE chromaticity diagram: the
the RGB components of a color image refer [1], [2]. shark-fin-shaped curve represents the spectral locus
LUCCHESE AND MITRA: A NEW CLASS OF CHROMATIC FILTERS FOR COLOR IMAGE PROCESSING. THEORY AND APPLICATIONS 537

whereas the straight segment represents the line of the

purple colors; the chromaticity coordinates of the physically
realizable colors belong to the convex hull bounded by and
[37].
The “intensity” information factored out in (4) is encoded in
the tristimulus value and has to be provided along with the
two chromaticity coordinates and in order to completely
and uniquely characterize a color. Therefore, a color can be
represented as or, more compactly, as . In
this paper, we will refer to and as the two chromatic channels
(or bands) and to as the achromatic channel (or band) of a
color image.
The inverse formulas of (4), which allow the transformation
of the color representation back to CIE coordi-
nates, are [37]

(5)

It is straightforward to translate the additive color mixture for-
mula of (3) into the CIE chromaticity diagram: by combining
(3) and (4), the chromaticity coordinates of
are
Fig. 3. Additive mixture of two colors with chromaticity coordinates k =
(x ; y ) and k = (x ; y ) in the CIE xy chromaticity diagram. The resulting
chromaticity coordinates k are obtained through the center of gravity law of
additive color mixtures expressed by (7). k and k are the CIE xy chromaticity
coordinates of the additive color mixtures of Fig. 4. S represents the spectral
locus and P the line of the purple colors.

(6a)

(6b)

These two equations, conveniently rearranged through (4), can

be written as

(7a)

(7b)

Equation (7) express the well-known center of gravity law of ad- Fig. 4. Various additive mixtures of two colors K and K in X Y Z
ditive color mixtures in the CIE chromaticity diagram [37]. It coordinates. K is obtained through (3), K through (8), and K through
(10). Only K and K have the same chromaticity coordinates because they
is important to observe that, in (7), the chromaticity coordinates lie on a straight line through the origin.
of the result of the mixture of two colors not only depend on their
relative amounts, according to weights and , but also
arbitrary value . From (5) and (6), the CIE tristim-
on their intensities and . This means that the chromaticity
ulus values are obtained as
coordinates of the resulting color lie on the segment joining the
chromaticity coordinates of the two original colors at a location
which is determined by both their mixing weights and their in-
tensities, as schematically represented in Fig. 3. The important (8)
implications of this dependence on the intensity values of the
colors being mixed will be discussed in Section IV

C. Alternative Color Mixtures By construction, the new color has the

A different color mixture can be obtained if, instead of com- same chromaticity coordinates as , i.e., (see Fig. 3),
puting from (3) as , is set to an but a different intensity value; from a geometric viewpoint, the
538 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 13, NO. 4, APRIL 2004

two colors and lie on the same straight line through the
origin in the vector space2 (see Fig. 4).
.By ignoring the center of gravity law expressed by (7), the
chromaticity coordinates can also be mixed with the alternative
convex combination given by

(9a)
(9b)

with . Also the point lies on the

segment linking the chromaticity coordinates of the two original
colors but at a location different from (see Fig. 3).
More precisely, it is only if or (no
mixture). It should be observed that, independent of the value
of , (9) returns the same result as (7) if the two colors to mix
satisfy the constraint or, equivalently from (4),
if .
Equation (9) yields the chromaticity coordinates of a color Fig. 5. Additive mixture of two colors with chromaticity coordinates
whose hue is somehow comprised between those of the two  = (u ; v ) and  = (u ; v ) in the CIE u v chromaticity diagram.
colors being mixed but physically unsubstantiated because the The resulting chromaticity coordinates  are obtained through the center of
gravity law of additive color mixtures expressed by (13). S represents the
mixing of chromaticities is actually expressed only through (7). spectral locus and P the line of the purple colors.
In fact, from the two chromaticity coordinates of (9), by setting
the coordinate to an arbitrary value , the CIE tris- as or, more compactly, as , where
timulus values are computed as .
The inverse formulas of (11), which allow the transformation
of the color representation back to the CIE
(10) coordinates, are [1], [2]

(12)
Unlike , the resulting color does
not have the same chromaticity coordinates as ; from a geo- In the new system of chromaticity coordinates defined by (11),
metric viewpoint,3 the point does not belong to the straight it is easy to prove [38] that (7) is simply rewritten as
line through the origin passing through (see Fig. 4). The two
colors and coincide only if or , namely
when the two colors and are not mixed altogether or, as (13a)
already pointed out above, if .

D. Additive Mixtures in the CIE Chromaticity Space (13b)

The chromaticity space can readily be derived from CIE
tristimulus values through (4) but has a drawback: it is not where , and are the chromaticity coordinates
perceptually uniform, i.e., equal Euclidean distances between of the two colors being mixed. Thus, the center of gravity
points within it do not correspond to equal perceptual differ- law applies to the CIE chromaticity space too and all
ences between the colors associated with those points. More the considerations made in Section II-C regarding alternative
uniform chromaticity coordinates have been advanced such as color mixtures in the CIE chromaticity diagram extend to
the CIE chromaticity diagram, which is derived from CIE analogous mixtures in the CIE diagram as well.
tristimulus values as [37], [38] Fig. 5 provides a sketch of the additive mixture of colors in
the CIE chromaticity diagram, where the chromaticities are
(11a) expressed as , ,2,3. represents the
spectral locus and the line of the purple colors within this
(11b) space.

With this alternative representation, the chromatic channels are III. COLOR FILTERING IN THE SPACE
encoded in and so that a color can be represented
A. The -Filter and -Filter
2This can easily be proven by observing that X =Y = X =Y and
Z =Y = Z =Y . Let a digital color image be represented in the
3In fact, X =Y 6= X =Y and Z =Y 6= Z =Y . CIE space by the vector-valued function
LUCCHESE AND MITRA: A NEW CLASS OF CHROMATIC FILTERS FOR COLOR IMAGE PROCESSING. THEORY AND APPLICATIONS 539

whose components represent, with . In (17), the weights have been re-
respectively, the amounts of red, green, and blue at each pixel4 placed by the 2-D filter kernel , referred to as the chromatic
. By using (2), the three bands are kernel, and the add and multiply operations have been expressed
converted to CIE coordinates as as 2-D linear convolutions5 denoted by symbol “ .”
Because of the convexity constraint , the
taps of the chromatic kernel have to be positive numbers sum-
(14)
ming up to unity, which leads to low-pass filtering implemen-
tations. Examples of filters satisfying this constraint include
which, through (11), provide the chromatic signals local averaging and smoothing operators such as Gaussian and
moving average kernels.
Equations (17a) and (17b) respectively represent the I/O re-
(15a)
lations of what we have termed the - filter and the - filter.
Clearly, these are space-invariant nonlinear filters with multiple
(15b) inputs, respectively three and two, and one output but the non-
linearity simply consists in the quotient operations they require.
The image is thus equivalently represented as Once the input signals of the two filters are appropriately com-
. bined, the signals at the numerators and denominators of (17) are
The structure of (13) suggests a new nonlinear scheme for obtained through linear filtering operations which can be imple-
filtering the chromatic channels of . The convex combina- mented efficiently with the fast Fourier transform (FFT).
tion of two sets of chromaticity coordinates according to (13) The block diagram representations of the -filter and -filter
can, in fact, be extented to the mixture of samples having are shown in Fig. 6, where the block carries out the multipli-
chromaticity coordinates and intensity values , cation of its input signals while the block performs the mul-
, as tiplication of the input denoted by “up” with the inverse6 of the
input denoted by “down.” The scheme of Fig. 6 also shows the
color space conversion stages and : the former transforms
the CIE image into -, -, and -channels according
to (2) and (9); the latter accomplishes the inverse transformation
on the filtered image through (11) and the inversion of (2).
As a term of comparison, in this paper the -band and
-band will also be processed with the linear filtering opera-
(16) tions expressed by the equations

(18a)
(18b)
In (16), the weights can be thought of as the taps of a 2-D dig-
ital filter applied to and as the chromaticity If the kernel satisfies the constraint ,
coordinates of the resulting image , represented as (18) can be regarded as the generalization of (9) for CIE
. By taking the spatial dependence of the chromaticity coordinates.
signals into account, the terms in (16) can be written as
B. The -Filter
The focus of this paper is on the new algorithmic framework
for the joint processing of the two chromatic signals and
. The processing of the achromatic channel does not
present any aspect of novelty, having been the traditional sub-
ject of gray-level image processing for decades. This signal can
(17a) be left unprocessed, in which case , or processed
in various ways depending on the specific applications. If it un-
dergoes linear space-invariant filtering, this operation is defined
by means of 2-D linear convolution as

(19)

(17b) 5The notation y[n n] = h[n

n 0 m ]x[m
m] = h[n
n] 3 x[n
n] is a com-
m
pact version of the notation y[n ;n ] = h[n 0 m ;n 0
m ]x[m ; m ] = h[n ; n ] 3 x[n ; n ] expressing the linear convolution of
4The pixel-based domain of a digital image is represented by the orthogonal 2-D signals.
Cartesian lattice
:
= 2 :
, where denotes the set of integers, i.e., = 6Since the chromatic coordinates cannot be zero, the computation of 1=v [n
n]
f...;0 02; g
1; 0; 1; 2; . . . . does not give rise to singularities.
540
Fig. 6. Block diagram representation of the filtering scheme in u v Y coordinates. Blocks and
F
conversion stages. The former transforms the CIE RGB image into u -, v -, and Y -channels according to (2) and (11). The latter accomplishes the inverse
G
transformation on the filtered image through (12) and the inversion of (2).
where is an appropriate kernel (referred to as the intensity
kernel or intensity impulse response) for a certain application.
The lowermost branch of the scheme of Fig. 6 shows the I/O
block diagram of the linear filtering operation expressed by (19).
It is worth observing7 that, if the two chromatic channels of
image are processed with (17) and the achromatic channel is
processed through (19) with , the filtered image
is the same as that one would obtain by filtering with the same
kernel all three components of .
The nonlinear filtering of the intensity channel is generically
denoted as
(20)
and may refer to operations such as morphological filtering,
median filtering, isotropic and anisotropic diffusion (see
Section IV-B), etc. In both linear and nonlinear cases, the
processing of the achromatic channel will be referred to as
-filtering.
In designing algorithms for color image filtering, the spatial
frequency content of the chromatic and achromatic signals plays
a very important role. In fact, most of the spatial structure of
natural images (edges, corners, textures, and all other fine-scale
details associated with high spatial frequencies) is encoded in the
achromatic channel whereas the two chromatic channels carry
low-frequency information [30]. A straightforward consequence
of this frequency distribution is that the chromatic signals can be
low-pass filtered without compromising the spatial sharpness of
color images at all. On the other hand, the achromatic channel
has to be processed with operators that preserve the high-
7The reader can easily verify this claim by: a) substituting (13) in (12); b)
0
simplifying these expression through Y = Y + (1 )Y , which leads to
(3), equivalent, through (2), to (1); and c) generalizing this result through the
convolution sum.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 13, NO. 4, APRIL 2004
T
T
respectively represent the input and output color space
frequency components of the image. In denoising applications,
this excludes the use of linear low-pass filters for removing
noise in the achromatic channel, making nonlinear operators
the only viable solution for the -filtering of our scheme. In
Section IV-B, we will show that anisotropic diffusion [11] is
an ideal candidate for this task.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The properties of the -filter and -filter of (17) have been
extensively investigated through experimentation with both syn-
thetic and real images; however, only a representative subset of
the experimental tests we have carried out are reported here due
to space constraints. Simple real images consisting of two uni-
form colored patches juxtaposed to each other have been used
for testing the responses of the filters across edges. The de-
noising properties of the new filters have instead been tested
with real images artificially corrupted by uncorrelated white
Gaussian noise and compared against the performances of other
representative existing techniques.
In both sets of experiments, perceptual differences between
images have been quantitatively evaluated with the S-CIELAB
metric [39], which is a spatial extension (whence the prefix “S”)
of the standardized CIELAB metric [37]. The S-CIELAB metric
was chosen because it takes into account both spatial and color
sensitivity of the human visual system in measuring perceived
errors in color images and has been shown to outperform all
other color metrics in image processing applications [40].
A. Experiments On Synthetic Images
Fig. 7(a) and (e) show two synthetic images and ; both
have size 25 40 pixels and are made up of two uniform colored
patches. In both cases, the chromaticity coordinates of the left
LUCCHESE AND MITRA: A NEW CLASS OF CHROMATIC FILTERS FOR COLOR IMAGE PROCESSING. THEORY AND APPLICATIONS 541

C
Fig. 7. (a) Original color image ; the two patches have uniform color with chromaticity coordinates (u ; v ) = (0:218; 0:577) and (u ; v ) = (0:541; 0:502)
C
(left and right, respectively), whereas their intensity values are Y = 0:875 and Y = 0:010, respectively. (b) Global low-pass filtering of . (c) Nonlinear
C C C
chromatic low-pass filtering of . (d) Linear chromatic low-pass filtering of . (e) Original color image ; the two patches have uniform color with the same
chromaticity coordinates as C C
whereas their intensity values are Y = 0:199 and Y = 0:179, respectively. (f) Global low-pass filtering of . (g) Nonlinear
C C 2
chromatic low-pass filtering of . (h) Linear chromatic low-pass filtering of . The same 11 11 MA filter was employed for all filtering operations.

Fig. 8. (a) Perceptual color difference, measured according to the S-CIELAB metric, between image Cof Fig. 7(a) and its filtered versions of Fig. 7(c) and (d)
(shorter and longer curve, respectively). (b) Perceptual color difference, between image C
of Fig. 7(e) and its filtered versions of Fig. 7(g) and (h) (the two curves
coincide).

portion are whereas those of the right channels of and with the same 11 11 MA
portion are . The intensity values are, filter.
respectively, and for the image of 2) Nonlinear chromatic low-pass filtering: The - and
Fig. 7(a) and and for the image of -channels are filtered by using (17) where is the
Fig. 7(e). 11 11 MA filter. The achromatic channel is not pro-
Images and have been low-pass filtered in the three fol- cessed; in the scheme of Fig. 6, this operation corresponds
lowing ways by using the same 11 11 moving average (MA) to setting , where is the 2-D discrete-
filter as the convolution kernel:8 domain unit sample function.
1) Global low-pass filtering : All three bands , , and 3) Linear chromatic low-pass filtering : The - and -
are filtered. In the scheme of Fig. 6, both chromatic channels are filtered by using (18) where is the
and achromatic kernels and are 11 11 MA same 11 11 MA filter. Also in this operation, the achro-
filters. As pointed out in Section III-B, this is equivalent matic channel is not processed.
to a filtering operation carried out on each one of the CIE Fig. 7(b)–(d) display the results of these three filtering opera-
tions on image and Fig. 7(f)–(h) the analogous results for
8Different types of low-pass kernels with different sizes have been tested and image . Fig. 8(a) shows the perceptual color difference, mea-
2
produced similar results. The 11 11 MA filter was chosen because, given the sured according to the S-CIELAB metric,9 between image
size of the test images, it generates a rather wide transition band along the ver-
C C
tical edge of images and and because its behavior can easily be interpreted 9The numerical values were computed with the Matlab software implenting
in the CIE u v chromaticity diagram. the S-CIELAB metric which is available at [41].
542
Fig. 9. (a) CIE u v chromaticity diagram relative to Fig. 7(b) and (c).
(b) Chromaticity diagram relative to Fig. 7(d). (c) Chromaticity diagram
relative to Fig. 7(f) and (g). (d) Chromaticity diagram relative to Fig. 7(h). The
extremal “+” symbols denote the chromaticity coordinates of the two colors of
C and C ; all other “+” symbols denote the chromaticity coordinates of the
colors introduced by low-pass filtering. The circles denote the chromaticity
coordinates of the reference white color.
of Fig. 7(a) and the filtered images of Fig. 7(c) and (d) (shorter
and longer curve, respectively). Fig. 8(b) shows the perceptual
color difference between the image of Fig. 7(e) and the filtered
images of Fig. 7(g) and (h) (the two curves coincide).
Fig. 9(a) shows the CIE chromaticity diagram relative
to the images of Fig. 7(b) and (c) (it is obvious in fact from the
above that the first two filtering operations produce the same
chromaticity constellations) and Fig. 9(b) the chromaticity
diagram relative to the image of Fig. 7(d). Similarly, Fig. 9(c)
shows the chromaticity diagram relative to the images of
Figs. 7(f) and (g) and 9(d) the chromaticity diagram relative to
the image of Fig. 7(h). The extremal “+” symbols denote the
chromaticity coordinates of the two colors of and ; all
other “+” symbols denote the chromaticity coordinates of the
colors introduced by low-pass filtering. The circles indicate the
chromaticity coordinates of the reference white color.
First of all, we may observe that the results of Fig. 7(b) and
(f) are those that one would expect from the mixture of the two
color patches making up and . One color gradually blends
into the other because of the tapering effect generated by the
11 11 MA filter kernel sliding across the vertical edge: the ten
intermediate color shades give rise to a smooth transition band
representing the typical result of low-pass filtering along sharp
edges.
The results obtained in Fig. 7(c) with nonlinear chromatic
low-pass filtering and Fig. 7(d) with linear chromatic low-pass
filtering are remarkably different. Since the spatial structure
of images is essentially embedded in the achromatic channel,
the band of our color representation, the chromatic low-pass
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 13, NO. 4, APRIL 2004
filtering has substantially preserved the sharpness of the edge
between the two colored patches. However, this not true in
general as shown by the results of Fig. 7(g) and (h), where
chromatic low-pass filtering has yielded results very similar
to those of global low-pass filtering (Fig. 7(f)). The following
can be noticed.
• Nonlinear chromatic low-pass filtering always outper-
forms linear chromatic low-pass filtering if one color
is brighter than the other (compare against
in image of Fig. 7(a)). We remember
that in (17), the chromaticity coordinates are weighted
based on both the filter kernel coefficients and the tris-
timulus value . The latter weighting undoubtedly has
a positive effect at the edges because the chromaticity
coordinates of the new colors introduced by filtering
are much closer to the chromaticity coordinates of the
brighter color than to those of the darker color [this
effect is clearly noticeable in the chromaticity diagram
of Fig. 9(a)], which translates into a generally barely
visible transition band on the brighter side of the edge.
On the darker side of the edge, the color shift is not
visible at all. In Fig. 8(a) the perceptual color difference10
measured with the S-CIELAB metric (shorter curve)
is less than one unit on the left side of the edge and
practically zero on the right side. In fact, the image of
Fig. 7(c) is essentially identical to the original image
of Fig. 7(a).
• If one color is brighter than the other, linear chromatic
low-pass filtering introduces hue shifts on the brighter side
of the edge and the net visual effect is that the color of the
darker side seems to smear or bleed into the brighter side
[see Fig. 7(d)]. The perceptual color difference between
filtered and original image is quantified by the longer
curve of Fig. 8(a). This curve is close to linear on the
brighter side of the edge, and practically flat and equal
to zero on the darker side. The smearing effect can easily
be explained by examining the chromaticity diagram of
Fig. 9(b) which refers to the image of Fig. 7(d). The
chromaticity coordinates of the colors introduced by linear
chromatic low-pass filtering are uniformly distributed
between the chromaticity coordinates of the two original
colors of .
In the case of the 11 11 MA filter used in our
examples, it is straightforward to show that, based on
(18), ten evenly spaced points11 appear between the two
original points in the chromaticity diagram. Half of these
points are associated with the five new colors produced
by filtering on the left side of the edge (they are clearly
visible in Fig. 7(d)) and the other half with the five
10It should be noted that chromatic fidelity metrics such as the mean
chromaticity error (MCRE) [5] are inadequate for comparing the results
of Fig. 7(c) and (d). The MCRE would be much larger for the former
image, even though this is perceptually much closer than the latter to the
reference image.
11For other convolution kernels, e.g., for Gaussian filters, the locations
of the new chromaticity coordinates of the colors within the transition
band can be computed from the kernel coefficients.
LUCCHESE AND MITRA: A NEW CLASS OF CHROMATIC FILTERS FOR COLOR IMAGE PROCESSING. THEORY AND APPLICATIONS 543

Fig. 10. (a) Original color image C . (b) Noisy version of C obtained by adding zero-mean uncorrelated white Gaussian noise to the three RGB bands. The
RGB components are normalized over [0,1] and the noise variance is  = 0:005.

new colors on the right side. Since the channel is chromaticity diagrams of Fig. 9(c) and (d), referring to
not processed, the first set of chromaticity coordinates the images of Fig. 7(g) and (h), respectively.
is combined with the large intensity value of the left
side and the second set with the small intensity value B. Experiments on Real Images
of the right side. Therefore, while on the right side the Fig. 10(a) shows a 440 440-pixel color image12 de-
filtering-induced colors are almost unnoticeable because fined as whose components
of the low intensity, on the left side the large intensity gives are normalized over [0,1]. This image was corrupted by
rise to five bright colors having hues comprised between adding zero-mean uncorrelated white Gaussian noise to the
those of the two original colors. This effect is prevented by three components of to generate the noisy image
the nonlinear chromatic low-pass filtering since the new of Fig. 10(b); the noise
chromaticity coordinates are closely clustered toward the variance is and the normalized signal to noise
chromaticity coordinates of the brighter color (compare ratio (NSNR) defined as NSNR NMSE with
Fig. 9(b) against Fig. 9(a)). Even though the chromatic NMSE [5] is
offset of the five new colors on the right side of the 19.30 dB.
edge is larger than in the previous case, these colors are The noisy image of Fig. 10(b), represented in the space
perceptually masked by their low intensity and cannot as , has been processed according
be distinguished from the original dark color of the right to four different filtering algorithms labeled F1–F4 and defined
side of the edge. as follows.
• When the brightness of the two colors is not very different, F1) The chromatic channels and have been
nonlinear and linear chromatic low-pass filtering perform low-pass filtered according to (17) where is an
similarly. In particular, they yield the very same result 11 11 MA filter and its achromatic channel
if the color components of the two uniform patches has been processed with ten iterations of anisotropic
satisfy the constraint , which is analogous diffusion [11].
to the constraint for the space F2) Its chromatic channels have been low-pass filtered ac-
discussed in Section II-C. Image of Fig. 7(e) was cording to (18) with the same chromatic kernel used
generated by satisfying this requirement. It can be noticed for F1 and its achromatic channel has been processed
from Fig. 7(g) and (h) that the nonlinear and linear as in F1.
chromatic low-pass filtering of this image produce the F3) The chromatic diffusion framework proposed
same effect, which is similar to the effect of global by Tang et al. in [17] has been implemented:
low-pass filtering of Fig. 7(f). Fig. 8(b) confirms that the the achromatic channel of , encoded by
perceptual color difference bewteen the images of Fig. 7(g) has been
and (h) and the reference image of Fig. 7(e) is the same processed with 10 iterations of anisotropic diffusion;
in both cases: the curve, relative to nonlinear chromatic its chromatic content, encoded by the three signals
low-pass filtering coincides with the curve relative to linear , , and
chromatic low-pass filter. This identical performance is 12Image C is a detail of the fresco entitled “The Creation of Eve” (XVI Cen-
also mirrored by identical point constellations in the tury), painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
544 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 13, NO. 4, APRIL 2004

[]
Fig. 11. (a) Result of denoising algorithm F1 applied to the image  n of Fig. 10(b). (b) Result of denoising algorithm F2. (c) and (d) Perceptual color differences
1 E measured according to the S-CIELAB metric between the denoised images of (a) and (b), respectively, and the reference color image C of Fig. 10(a). (e)
(1 )
and (f) Histograms h E of the perceptual color differences of (c) and (d), respectively.

has been processed with ten
iterations of isotropic diffusion.
F4) The directional-distance filter (DDF) of [7], where dis-
crete vector directional and magnitude median filters
are combined, has been implemented: the size of the
filter mask is 5 5 and the weight is , which
gives equal importance to the two filtering criteria.
The results of these four operations are reported in Figs. 11
and 12. Fig. 11(a) shows the result of F1; Fig. 11(c) displays
the perceptual color difference , measured according to
the S-CIELAB metric, between this denoised image and the
reference color image of Fig. 10(a). Fig. 11(e) displays the
histogram . Similarly, Fig. 11(b), (d), and (f) show,
respectively, the result of F2, its perceptual color difference
LUCCHESE AND MITRA: A NEW CLASS OF CHROMATIC FILTERS FOR COLOR IMAGE PROCESSING. THEORY AND APPLICATIONS 545

[]
Fig. 12. (a) Result of denoising algorithm F3 applied to the image  n of Fig. 10(b). (b) Result of denoising algorithm F4. (c) and (d) Perceptual color differences
1 (1 )
E between the denoised images of (a) and (b), respectively, and the reference color image C of Fig. 10(a). (e) and (f) Histograms h E of the perceptual
color differences of (c) and (d), respectively.

with respect to the original, and the relative histogram. The
comparison of the two sets of results clearly indicates that
F1 performs better than F2; the smearing effects13 associated
13The smearing effects of F2 can be reduced by decreasing the size of
the MA filter or by using more selective low-pass kernels such as Gaussian
masks; however, F1 always outperforms F2 for the reasons explained in
Section IV-A.
with the linear low-pass filtering of the chromatic channels
is manifest in Fig. 11(b) where the edges between bright and
dark colors are affected by phantom colors (having reddish
hues) on the their brighter side. These large deviations from
the reference values of Fig. 10(a) appear as bright halos in the
error map of Fig. 11(d) (as the colorbar indicates, ranges
from 0 to about 50 units) and as tall bins for large values of
546
Fig. 13. (a) Image of Fig. 10(a) corrupted by salt & pepper noise with intensity 0.05; (b) Denoised version of image (a). (c) Perceptual color difference between
the denoised image of (b) and the reference color image C of Fig. 10(a). (d) Histogram of the perceptual color differences of (c).
in the histogram of Fig. 11(f). On the other hand, the
perceptual errors relative to the result of Fig. 11(a) are much
smaller as indicated by the reduced size and brightness of the
halos of Fig. 11(c) and by the tall bins for small values of
in the histogram of Fig. 11(e).
Fig. 12(a), (c), and (e) show, respectively, the result of F3, its
perceptual error , and the relative histogram . By
comparing the histograms of Figs. 11(e) and 12(e), F3 seems
to perform very similarly to F1; however, the comparison of
Figs. 11(a) and 12(a) [also against Fig. 10(a)] and Figs. 11(c)
and 12(c) reveals that some minor color smearing effects are
present in Fig. 12(a). Fig. 12(b), (d), and (f) show, respectively,
the result of F4, its perceptual error , and the relative his-
togram . By comparing the images of Fig. 12(a) and (b)
[also against Fig. 10(a)], one may notice that unlike F3, F4 does
not produce color smearing effects but blurs some finely tex-
tured details (e.g., some of the facial features of the larger figure
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 13, NO. 4, APRIL 2004
in the scene are lost in the denoising process). This is mirrored
by the presence of extended bright areas (large perceptual er-
rors) in the error image of Fig. 12(d).
Also the NSNRs were computed for the results of F1 through
F4; in the order, their values are 21.02, 19.54, 22.03, and
19.10 dB. It should, however, be observed how the perceptual
differences measured with the S-CIELAB metric have
a better correlation with the subjective evaluation of the
denoising results than the NSNRs.
In summary, from a perceptual point of view, F1 performs
better than F2, F3, and F4 and this was observed independent of
the noise level added to . Over the latter two methods, F1 has
another advantage: it is computationally much more convenient.
F3 requires in fact four iterative filtering schemes, one involving
anisotropic diffusion and three isotropic diffusions. F4 inherits
from the vector median filter, after which it was devised, its
computational burden since it requires lengthy sorting operations
LUCCHESE AND MITRA: A NEW CLASS OF CHROMATIC FILTERS FOR COLOR IMAGE PROCESSING. THEORY AND APPLICATIONS
within the filter mask [1]. On the other hand, F1 requires only
one iterative filtering operation for processing the achromatic
channel and the processing of the two chromatic channels is
only “structurally” nonlinear and can be efficiently carried out
with linear filtering operations; in fact, the computation of the
numerators and denominators of the -filter and -filter simply
requires linear convolution operations which are amenable to
fast implementations via FFT.
The -filter and -filter proposed in this paper were also
tested for the removal of impulse noise. The noisy image of
Fig. 13(a) was obtained by adding salt & pepper noise with
density 0.05 to the original image of Fig. 10(a). Fig. 13(b)
shows the result of the following denoising algorithm: the two
chromatic channels and were processed according to the
scheme of Fig. 6 where the chromatic kernel is an 11 11
MA filter; the achromatic channel was processed with a 3 3
median filter cascaded with 5 iterations of the anisotropic dif-
fusion scheme of [11]. Fig. 13(c) and (d), respectively, displays
the perceptual error of the denoised image with respect to the
original and the relative distribution. Although some high fre-
quency details have been blurred by the processing of the
channel [compare Fig. 13(b) against Fig. 10(a)] and the percep-
tual errors of Fig. 13(c) and (d) are larger than those of Fig. 11(c)
and (e), our filtering scheme proves to be effective in removing
impulse noise as well.
V. CONCLUDING REMARKS
This paper has advanced a new filtering scheme for pro-
cessing the chromatic content of color images, encoded by
the CIE chromaticity coordinates. The combination of
spatial filtering with the center of gravity law of additive color
mixture, which applies to the chromaticity diagram, has
allowed us to derive a new filtering scheme for processing
these two low-frequency signals. The proposed -filter and
-filter are noniterative and nonlinear operators; however, the
nonlinearity is only structural because because their numerators
and denominators are computed through linear convolution
operations and, as such, are amenable to computationally
efficient implementations by means of FFT algorithms. The
processing of the achromatic channel is independent of the
chromatic filtering and has to be performed with operators
that preserve the high spatial frequencies embedded in it; we
have shown that, in image denoising applications, anisotropic
diffusion and median filtering can be used, respectively, to
remove white Gaussian noise and impulse noise from the
band. At the same time, however, the achromatic channel
provides an important input to the -filter and -filter thereby
eliminating possible annoying hue shifts across regions with
different intensity levels. From the experiments reported in the
paper, it clearly emerges that the filtering scheme we propose
provides a very valuable tool for smoothing and regularizing
chromatic signals and advocates a new approach to color image
filtering. Instead of considering color as a 3-D signal, we have
shown that it can be processed along two distinct pathways,
one operating on 2-D chromatic signals and one operating on
1-D achromatic signals, provided that the interactions between
the two are appropriately taken into account.
547
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their
valuable comments which have greatly improved the original
version of the manuscript. One of the authors, L. Lucchese,
thanks K. Hirakawa from Cornell University for his many com-
ments and suggestions.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 13, NO. 4, APRIL 2004
Luca Lucchese (M’01) received the D.Ing. and Ph.D. degrees, both in elec-
trical engineering, from the University of Padua, Padua, Italy, in 1993 and 1997,
respectively.
From 1997 to 2002, he was with the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, first as a post-doctoral
Researcher and then as a Visiting Assistant Professor. In 2002, he joined the
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State Univer-
sity, Corvallis, as an Assistant Professor, where he teaches courses of digital
signal processing and image processing. His research interests include digital
signal and image processing, computer vision, and three-dimensional imaging.
Dr. Lucchese is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE
PROCESSING and a member of the Signal Processing Society.
Sanjit K. Mitra (S’59–M’63–SM’69–F’74–LF’01) received the M.S. and
Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1960 and 1962, respectively, and an Honorary Dr. Tech. degree
from Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland, in 1987.
He has been on the faculty at the University of California since 1967, first at
the Davis campus and then at the Santa Barbara campus since 1977 as a Pro-
fessor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he served as Chairman of
the Department from July 1979 to June 1982. He has published over 600 papers
in signal and image processing, 12 books, and holds five patents.
Dr. Mitra has served IEEE in various capacities, including as President of the
IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society in 1986 and as a Member-at-Large
of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing (SP) Society from
1996 to 1999. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of three jour-
nals. He received the 1973 F.E. Terman Award and the 1985 AT&T Foundation
Award of the American Society of Engineering Education, the 1989 Education
Award, and the 2000 Mac Van Valkenburg Society Award of the IEEE CAS So-
ciety, the Distinguished Senior U.S. Scientist Award from the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation of Germany in 1989, the 1996 Technical Achievement
Award and the 2001 Society Award of the IEEE SP Society, the IEEE Millen-
nium Medal in 2000, the McGraw-Hill Jacob Millman Award of the IEEE Ed-
ucation Society in 2001, and the 2002 Technical Achievement Award of the
European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP). He is the co-recipient
of the 2000 Blumlein-Browne-Willans Premium of the Institution of Electrical
Engineers (London, U.K.) and the 2001 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND
SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY Best Paper Award. He is a member of the
U.S. National Academy of Engineering, an Academician of the Academy of
Finland, a member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences, a
foreign member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a foreign
member of the Academy of Engineering of Mexico. Dr. Mitra is a Fellow of the
AAAS and SPIE, and a member of EURASIP and ASEE.