Color image filtering is one of the most common research tasks in the area of color image processing. Color image filtering techniques can be divided as component-wise methods and vector processing based methods. However

the component-wise methods were only used in the early time and a large amount of research indicates that the vector filtering methods are more efficient than the component-wise methods since the vector processing based methods can preserve better the spectral characteristics of color images. This paper systematically summarizes and analyzes the fundamental theories and methods of color image vector filtering

and discusses the recent

important developments in this field. Some typical applications of color image vector filtering techniques are also reported in this paper. First

the classification of color image vector filtering techniques is analyzed

and for each class of filtering technique

the most commonly-used

representative filtering algorithms are introduced and explained in detail. Then

combining the authors research on this field

some new research methods are proposed. Finally

for some representative

frequently-used filtering algorithms

by taking the impulsive noise for example

both the perceptual visual effect and objective evaluation data are presented to illustrate their filtering performance.