Quaternion and Octonion Color Image Processing with MATLAB

Color image processing has attracted much interest in recent years. The use of color in image processing is motivated by the facts that (1) the human eyes can discern thousands of colors, and image processing is used both for human interaction and computer interpretation; (2) a color image comprises more information than a grayscale image; (3) color features are robust to several image-processing procedures (for example, to the translation and rotation of the regions of interest); (4) color features are efficiently used in many vision tasks, including object recognition and tracking, image segmentation and retrieval, image registration, etc.; and (5) color is necessary in many real-life applications such as visual communications, multimedia systems, fashion and food industries, computer vision, entertainment, consumer electronics, production printing and proofing, digital photography, biometrics, digital artwork reproduction, industrial inspection, and biomedical applications. Finally, the enormous number of color images that are constantly uploaded to the Internet require new approaches to visual media creation, retrieval, processing, and applications. This also gives us new opportunities to create a number of large, visual data-driven applications. The main goal of this book is to provide the mathematics of quaternions and octonions and to show how they can be used in emerging areas of color image processing.