Behavioural study of median associative memory under true-colour image patterns

Median associative memories (MED-AMs) are a special type of associative memory that substitutes the maximum and minimum operators of a morphological associative memory with the median operator. This associative model has been applied to restore grey scale images and provided a better performance than morphological associative memories when the patterns are altered with mixed noise. Despite their power, MED-AMs have not been adopted in problems related with true-colour patterns. In this paper, we describe how MED-AMs can be applied to problems involving true-colour patterns. Furthermore, a complete study of the behaviour of this associative model in the restoration of true-colour images is performed using a benchmark of 16,000 images altered by different noise types.