The classical vector median filter (VMF) has been widely used to remove impulse noise from color images. However

since the VMF cannot identify thin lines during the denoising process

many thin lines may be removed out as noise. This serious problem can be solved by a newly proposed filter that uses a noise detector to find these thin lines and then keep them unchanged. In this new approach

the noise detection scheme applied on a current processed pixel is realized through counting the close pixels in its eight neighbor positions and the expanded window to see whether the current pixel is corrupted by impulse noise. Based on the previous outputs

our algorithm can increase the performance in detecting and canceling the impulse noise. Extensive experiments indicate that this approach can be used to remove the impulse noise from a color image without distorting the useful information.