Hardware/Software Design of a Rational Filter to Remove Mixed Noise Detected in Color Medical Images

This paper presents a hardware/software (HW/SW) design of a rational filter to remove mixed noise detected in medical color images. The used filter is the Vector Directional Distance Rational Hybrid Filter (VDDRHF). It is an effective filter for mixed noise reduction and fine color image details preservation, which is a very important topic for medical images. Our proposed design incorporates a sequence of optimizations for performance improvement, including: pipeline optimization to maximize throughput and minimize latency, parallel processing of the VDDRHF algorithm to process multiple pixels concurrently, some nonlinear function approximations to reduce hardware complexity and power consumption. Extensive validation based on SoPC (System on Programmable Chip) using FPGA board has demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed architecture in preserving color image quality by removing mixed noise and significantly reducing filtering execution time, setting a new benchmark for real‐time medical color image processing. © 2026 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.