A QUATERNION GRADIENT OPERATOR FOR COLOR IMAGE EDGE DETECTION
Lianghai Jin, Enmin Song, Lei Li, and Xiang Li
School of Computer Science and Technology,
Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China
ABSTRACT
Estimating gradients of color images is important to many
color image processing tasks. However, the research on
color image gradients is limited. In this paper, a novel
method of estimating color image gradients is presented.
The proposed gradient mechanism is based on measuring
the squared local contrast variation of a color image
function, in which the chromatic variation is evaluated by
quaternion representation. As an application in color image
processing, we apply the proposed gradient operator to the
traditional grayscale image Canny operator for color edge
detection. The edge detection results indicate that the
proposed color gradient operator is superior to other state-
of-the-art color image gradient methods. 
Index Terms— Gradient, quaternion, color image, edge
detection
1. INTRODUCTION
Gradient plays important role in image processing and
computer vision. The gradient associated with a pixel is
usually defined as a 2-D column vector and can be
expressed by a complex number, in which the vector angle
indicates the direction of the largest growth of the image
function.
For grayscale images, numerous gradient estimators have
been developed. However, for color images, which are
usually described as 3D vector fields, this issue has not
obtained the same sufficient attention [1,2]. In general, color
image gradient methods can be divided into three major
categories. The first type is characterized by a single
estimate of the orientation and strength of an edge at a point
[3]. The first such method is proposed by Robinson [4], who
computed 24 directional derivatives (8 neighbors per color
channel) and chose the one with the largest magnitude as
the gradient. Later, Ruzon and Tomasi [3] utilized a color
distribution to represent a neighborhood and implemented
edge, junction, and corner detection.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grant No. 60972098.
E-mail: Lianghaijin@gmail.com (Lianghai Jin).
978-1-4799-2341-0/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE
The second kind of color gradient methods is based on
grayscale image gradient operators. The methods of this
type first use grayscale image gradient estimators to
compute the gradient vectors for each color component and
then combine them to get the final gradient vectors.
Obviously, the methods of such type do not consider the
correlation between color channels.
The third type of color gradient estimators is based on
finding the maximum changes of image vectors. Di Zenzo
[5] proposed a classical multichannel gradient operator,
which is based on measuring the squared local contrast
variations of multichannel images. However, there exists
indetermination in Di Zenzo’s gradient direction, which has
been not well solved until our recent work gives a clear
solution [6]. Scharcanski and Venetsanopoulos developed a
local vector statistics based gradient method for color edge
detection [7], in which they used the differences between
the average color vectors of the samples inside the sub-
windows in horizontal and vertical directions to estimate the
maximum variation of a color image in each pixel position.
Recently, Nezhadarya and Ward proposed a new color
image gradient operator [8]. This method first applies
highpass and lowpass vector operators in an appropriate
manner in both horizontal and vertical directions and then
performs an aggregation operator in each direction to find
the corresponding partial derivatives.
In this paper, we propose a new method to compute color
image gradients, in which quaternion rotation mechanism is
used to measure the color contrast variations. As an
application in image processing, we apply the new gradient
operator to color image edge detection.
2. PROPOSED COLOR GRADIENT OPERATOR
The proposed gradient operator for color images is based on
measuring the squared local contrast variation of a color
image function, which is similar to Di Zenzo’s gradient
method. However, unlike Di Zenzo’s method that uses
Euclidean distance to measure the change rate of an image
function, the proposed gradient is computed according to
brightness change and chromaticity variation measured by
quaternion rotation mechanism.
3040 ICIP 2013
2.1. Quaternion Representation of Color Distance
Quaternions, which were discovered by Hamilton in 1843
[9], are the generalization of the conventional complex
numbers. A quaternion consists of one real component and
three orthogonal imaginary components, and is usually
represented in the following algebraic form:
q  abicj d k ,
where a, b, c, and d are real coefficients, and i, j, and k are
complex operators that satisfy the following rules:
 i 2  j 2  k 2  ijk   1

 ij  k , jk  i, ki  j .
 ji   k , kj  i, ik   j
The modulus and conjugate of quaternion q are defined,
respectively, as follows:
q  a 2  b2  c2  d 2 ,
q  a  bi  cj  dk .
When the real component is equal to zero, quaternion q is
named pure quaternion. A quaternion with unit modulus is
called a unit quaternion.
Using quaternion representation, a RGB color pixel
x  [r , g , b] T can be represented in quaternion form as a
pure quaternion in which the three imaginary parts represent
the red, green, and blue components of this pixel,
respectively, i.e.
q  r i g jbk .
It is well known that a color difference should include both
chromatic difference and luminance variation. However, Eq.
(8) does not include the luminance variation. So, we
propose the following equation to compute the squared
color distance of q1 and q2 :
D  q1 , q 2   t Q (q1 , q 2 )  1  t  I (q1 , q 2 ) ,
2 2
(9)
(1)
where Q (q1 , q2 ) and I (q1 , q 2 ) denotes the differences of
q1 and q2 in chromaticity and luminance, respectively, and
the weight t  [0,1] gives the importance of chromatic
difference and luminance variation. I (q1 , q 2 ) can be
(2) normalized as
I (q1 , q2 )  k1  r2  r1   k2  g2  g1   k3  b2  b1  , (10)
where ki (i  1, 2,3) represent the contributions of red,
green, blue channels to image luminance. Typically, we can
(3) set k1  k2  k3  1 3 or k1  0.299, k 2  0.587, k3  0.114 [1].
(4)
2.2. Color Image Gradient Operator
Let a color image f ( x, y) be represented in quaternion form:
f ( x , y )  R ( x , y ) i  G ( x , y ) j  B ( x, y ) k , (11)
and consider the squared local color change of f ( x, y) at
position ( x, y ) in any direction  :
D  f ( x, y), f ( x   cos , y   sin  ) 
2
 t Q  f ( x, y), f ( x   cos , y   sin  )   . (12)
(5) 1  t  I  f ( x, y), f ( x   cos , y   sin  ) 
2

Assume unit pure quaternion R  (i  j  k) 3 and two  t A1  1  t  A2

color pixels q1  r1 i  g1 j  b1 k and q2  r2 i  g 2 j  b2 k , and Using the first order partial differential approximation,
denote the sum of the expression of q2  Rq1R* as q3 : we can obtain

q3  q2  Rq1R*  r3 i  g3 j  b3 k , (6) A1   2  E1 cos 2   2F1 cos sin  H1 sin 2   , (13)

Then, the magnitude of the following quaternion A 2   2  E 2 cos 2   2F2 cos sin  H 2 sin 2   , (14)

Q (q1, q2 )   r3  (r3  g3  b3 ) 3 i  where

 3  (r3  g3  b3 ) 3 j  .
g (7) E  r 2  g 2  b 2
 1 x x x
 b3  (r3  g3  b3 ) 3 k F1  rx ry  g x g y  bxb y , (15)
H  r 2  g 2  b 2
denotes the chromatic difference of color pixels q1 and q2  1 y y y
[10].  2
 R( x, y) G( x, y) B( x, y) 
By a simple computation, Eq. (7) can be written as: E2   k1 x  k2 x  k3 x 
  
 1
3 
Q(q1,q2)   r2  r1     r2 r1   g2 g1   b2 b1   i  
F2 
 R( x, y) G( x, y) B( x, y) 
 k1 x  k2 x  k3 x   (16)
 
 
 g2  g1   13 r2 r1   g2 g1  b2 b1   j  . (8) 
  R( x, y) G( x, y) B( x, y) 
 k1 y  k2 y  k3 y 
 
 b2  b1   13 r2 r1   g2 g1  b2 b1  k


H 2 

 R( x, y) G( x, y)

B( x, y) 
 k1 y  k2 y  k3 y 
2

  

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In Eq. (15),
c z  C(xz, y)  13  R(xx, y)  G( xx, y)  B(xx, y)  ,
 
z{x, y} , c{r, g , b} , and C {R, G, B} .
Based on the above analysis, we have the following
conclusion:
Theorem: Let a RGB color image f (x, y) be represented
as  R( x, y ), G ( x, y ), B( x, y )  , then the squared color
distance function in direction  , which include the changes
in both chromaticity and luminance, can be written as
g ( )  E cos2   2F cos sin   H sin 2  ,
where
 E  t E1  1  t  E 2

 F  t F1  1  t  F2 , (19)
 H  t H 1  1  t  H 2
E1 , F1 , H 1 , E 2 , F2 , H 2 are defined by Eqs. (15)–(17), and
weight t  [0,1] denotes the importance of the chromaticity
and luminance. Furthermore, the maximum value of
g ( ) , g max (gradient magnitude), and the direction that
maximizes g ( ) ,  max (gradient angle), are
Although some quaternion theories have been applied to
color image edge detection [11], we only consider gradient-
(17) based edge detection methods in this paper. We apply the
proposed gradient operator to traditional grayscale image
Canny operator for color edge detection. Some state-of-the-
art color image gradient methods are chosen for
performance comparison, including the original Di Zenzo’s
gradient operator [5] and its improved version [6],
Scharcanski and Venetsanopoulos’ gradient estimator [7],
the RCMG-Median-Mean operator [8], and Ruzon and
Tomasis’ Compass operator [3]. For all gradient operators,
the edge maps are obtained by adjusting the high and low
thresholds of Canny edge detector until the best edge results
are obtained. In addition, parameter t is set to 0.65. The
(18) original test images are shown in Fig. 1 and the edge
detection results by various color gradient methods are
shown in Figs. 2 and 3. It is easy to observe from the figures
that the proposed method produces more continuous and
pleasing edges compared to other methods (observe the arc
line at the bottom of Fig. 2 and the beak of the right parrot
in Fig. 3).

2 
g max  1  E  H    E  H    2 F 
2 2
, (20)

  g max  E 
12
sgn  F  arcsin  Fig. 1. Original color test images: (a) Blocks, (b) Parrots.
  k ,
  2 g max  E  H  (21)
 max   2 To objectively evaluate the edge detectors, we use the
 E H  F2  0 ROC plot [12], in which the false positive detection rate
 2 (FPR) is the percentage of the false positive edges to the
Undefined ,  E  H   F  0
2
total true non-edges and the false negative detection rate
and at the same time,  max satisfies the following (FNR) is the percentage of the false negative examples to
constraints: the total true edges. A synthetic “Grids” color image and its
ground truth edge map are shown in Fig. 4. The edge maps
  0,  4  , F 0 & EH 0 produced by various gradient methods are shown in Fig. 5
   4 ,  2  , F  0 & EH 0 , and the corresponding FPR and FNR results are listed in
 max  k  (22)
   2 ,  4 , F  0 & EH 0 Table 1. It is seen that the proposed method performs best
since it produces the best edge maps and the lowest FPR
   4 , 0  , F  0 & EH 0
and FNR values.
1 , F 0
where sgn(  ) is a sign function: sgn  F    . 4. CONCLUSION
 1 , F 0


The proof of the theorem is in fact to solve the maximum
value of Eq. (18), which has been solved by our recent work
[6]. Here we no more give the proof; the interested readers
are referred to [6].
3. APPLICATION TO COLOR EDGE DETECTION
A novel color image gradient method is proposed in this
paper. The proposed method uses quaternion representation
to measure the local contrast variations of color images. By
solving the maximum of the contrast variation equation, the
color image gradient is obtained. The experimental results
show the effectiveness of the proposed gradient estimator.

3042
Fig. 2. Edge detection results by various gradient methods: Fig. 3. Edge detection results by various gradient methods
(a) Compass operator, (b) RCMG-Median-Mean operator, listed in the caption of Fig. 2.
(c) Scharcanski and Venetsanopoulos’ gradient, (d) Di
Zenzo’s gradient, (e) improved Di Zenzo gradient [6], (f)
Proposed gradient.

Fig. 4. Synthetic color image “Grids” and the ground-truth

edge map.

FPR, FNR d 1 d 3
Methods FPR FNR FPR FNR
Compass 0.000346 0.048996 0.000132 0.043851
RCMG-MM 0.000071 0.036257 0.000050 0.034542
Scharcanski 0.001983 0.017393 0.001800 0.012984
Di Zenzo 0.000722 0.433611 0.000509 0.428466
Method [6] 0.000632 0.014944 0.000480 0.011514
Proposed 0.000613 0.011299 0.000469 0.009907

Table 1. False positive detection rates (FPR) and false

negative detection rates (FNR) of the “Grids” image, with Fig. 5. Edge detection results by various gradient methods
different distance thresholds  d (in pixels). listed in the caption of Fig. 2.

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