彩色图像滤波是彩色图像处理的最基本的研究领域之一。彩色图像滤波技术可以分成标量滤波法和矢量滤波法两大类。其中，标量滤波法只是早期的滤波方法。大量的研究表明，矢量滤波法比标量滤波法更加有效，因为它更能保护彩色图像的光谱特性。为使人们对彩色图像矢量滤波技术及其应用有个系统的了解，该文首先全面地总结了彩色图像矢量滤波的基本理论和方法，并跟踪该领域的最新进展，同时分析介绍了彩色图像矢量滤波技术的一些典型应用；然后对彩色图像矢量滤波技术进行了分类，并对每种类型的滤波算法中经典和目前最常用的算法做了详细的介绍和阐述；接着结合笔者对该领域的研究，提出了一些新的研究方法；最后，对于一些有代表性、经常使用的矢量滤波算法，以冲击噪声为例，给出了其视觉上的滤波效果和客观的评估数据。

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.