Aiming at addressing sluggish processing,excessive arithmetic operation for sequencing,and poor details with respect to the currently prevailing median filtering algorithms,this work made an attempt to design an improved cross-type fast median filtering algorithm with the features of threshold-based comparison,higher processing speed,and better performance,and to implement it on the FPGA hardware platform.The improved algorithm was proved by a comparative experiment to have many advantages such as fewer comparison times,less hardware resources utilization,and better re-tention of image details,and to achieve a processing utility technically adequate for real-time image preprocessing.