In this paper a new approach to soft color image mathematical morphology, called soft vector morphology, is presented. Its main characteristic is that it is compatible to soft gray-scale morphology. Furthermore, it is vector preserving technique. The primary and secondary soft vector morphological operations are defined. Then experimental results provided demonstrate that - analogously to their grayscale counterparts - soft vector morphological transforms are advantageous regarding small detail preservation and impulse noise attenuation from color images, in comparison to the corresponding standard vector morphological transforms recently introduced in Ref. 8. Finally, a new hardware FPGA structure capable of executing soft/standard vector erosion and dilation is presented. It processes two-dimensional 24-bit resolution color images by means of a 3 × 2-pixel 24-bit resolution color structuring element. Its function is fully pipelined: after initialization time it produces an output result per one clock-cycle. MAX+PLUS II software of Altera Corporation was employed for the design and simulation of the proposed hardware structure. The typical system clock frequency is 40MHz.