“…Recently, quaternion, as an elegant color image representation tool, has attracted much attention in the field of color image processing. For instance, it has achieved excellent results in the following applications: color image filtering [18], color image edge detection [19], color image denoising [20], [21], color image watermarking [22], color face recognition [23], color image inpainting [24] and so on. By using quaternion algebra, a color image is encoded as a pure quaternion matrix, that means it processes a color image holistically as a vector field and handles the coupling between the color channels naturally [18], [25], [26], and thus color information of source image is fully used.…”