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Quaternion Diffusion for Color Image Filtering

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Abstract

How to combine color and multiscale information is a fundamental question for computer vision, and quite a few color diffusion techniques have been presented. Most of these proposed techniques do not consider the direct interactions between color channel pairs. In this paper, a new method of color diffusion considering these effects is presented, which is based on quaternion diffusion (QD) equation. In addition to showing the solution to linear QD and its analysis, one form of nonlinear QD is discussed. Compared with other color diffusion techniques, considering the interactions between channel pairs, QD has the following advantages: 1) staircasing effect is avoided; 2) as diffusion tensor, the image derivative is regularized without requiring additional convolution; 3) less time is needed. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of linear and nonlinear QD applied to natural color images for denoising by both visual and quantitative evaluations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. France Telecom R &D Beijing, Beijing, 100080, P.R. China

    Zhong-Xuan Liu, Shi-Guo Lian & Zhen Ren

Authors
  1. Zhong-Xuan Liu
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  2. Shi-Guo Lian
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  3. Zhen Ren
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhong-Xuan Liu.

Additional information

Zhong-Xuan Liu was born in 1979. He received the Bachelor's degree in control theory from Shandong University in 2000 and Ph.D. degree in pattern recognition and image processing from Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005. He is currently a researcher for video analysis and compression in Service Anticipation Multimedia Innovation (SAMI) Lab of France Telecom R&D Center (Beijing). He has published about 20 papers including 3 international journal papers (as the first author) and more than 10 international conference papers. His research interests include 2-D Empirical mode decomposition and nonlinear diffusion based image processing techniques, video watermarking, video analysis, and texture processing.

Shi-Guo Lian was born in 1979. He received the B.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in information security from Nanjing University of Science & Technology in 2000 and 2005, respectively. He worked as a research assistant in the Department of Electronic Engineering of City University of Hong Kong from March 2004 to June 2004. He is now a researcher in Service Anticipation Multimedia Innovation (SAMI) Lab of France Telecom R&D Center (Beijing). His research interests include multimedia content protection, multimedia signal processing, chaos-based cipher and data authentication.

Zhen Ren received the M.S. degree in Southeast University, China and the Ph.D. degree from Grenoble National Institute of Technology, France. From Sep. 84 to Sep. 87, she was as computer engineer in Hydroelectricity Institute of Nankin of Hehai University, China; from Jan. 1997 to Mar. 2004, she has been worked in COSCO France S.A, Mitsubishi Electric Telecom France, French Embassy in China and Paycool Ltd; From Apr. 2004 to present, she has been in Multimedia and VAS Lab, France Telecom R&D Beijing. Her research interests include multimedia content protection and image/video processing.

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Liu, ZX., Lian, SG. & Ren, Z. Quaternion Diffusion for Color Image Filtering. J Comput Sci Technol 21, 126–136 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-006-0126-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-006-0126-5

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