A kind of universal nonlinear vector filter, i. e. , a vector filter based on neighbour-background-detection, was presented. The filter can be used not only in gray images , but also in spectral images , and it can keep the spectral information unchanged during erasing noise and small areas of odd spectral. At the same time it can sharpen the edge of the images in some extension. A practicable algorithm was designed to realize the filter. The experiments on two real remote sensing images show that the filter is helpful for the edge detecting and noise erasing.