Parameter-free quaternary orthogonal moments for color image retrieval and recognition

In order to describe color images, the use of the algebra of quaternions in combination with existing image orthogonal moments, meant for binary and grayscale images, has been widely investigated. This is because of their advantages in (1) gathering the three-channel color information in a single feature vector while preserving the correlation between them and in (2) eliminating shape information redundancy. However, the computation of these quaternary orthogonal moments depends on a unit pure quaternion parameter. The optimal value of this latter can be fixed only with the help of experiments and it is application-dependent. We propose a parameter-free formulation of the quaternary orthogonal moments. The general formula for the computation of the proposed moments, whose rotation invariance is achieved by retaining the modulus, is provided. Furthermore, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed modulus-based moment invariants for color image retrieval and recognition. (c) 2018 SPIE and IS&T