We study the steady states of a reaction-diffusion medium modelled by a stochastic 2D cellular automaton. We consider the Greenberg-Hastings model where noise and topological irregularities of the grid are taken into account. The decrease of the probability of excitation changes qualitatively the behaviour of the system from an ''active'' to an ''extinct'' steady state. Simulations show that this change occurs near a critical threshold ; it is identified as a nonequilibrium phase transition which belongs to the directed percolation universality class. We test the robustness of the phenomenon by introducing persistent defects in the topology : directed percolation behaviour is conserved. Using experimental and analytical tools, we suggest that the critical threshold varies as the inverse of the average number of neighbours per cell.