This paper presents a vector median filter that incorporates mechanism for the detection of impulses from color images. The vector pixels in  a specified window is ranked on the basis of sum of the distances to other vector pixels in the  window.  The center vector pixel is declared as corrupted if its rank  is bigger than a predefined  rank and its distance from a  nearby healthy vector pixel is bigger than a predefined threshold. The corrupted vector pixel is replaced by the vector median.  The experimental results show the better performance of the proposed method than a number of existing schemes for color images corrupted by high percentage of impulse noise.