Quaternion matrix completion using untrained quaternion convolutional neural network for color image inpainting

The use of quaternions as a novel tool for color image representation has yielded impressive results in color image processing. By considering the color image as a unified entity rather than separate color space components, quaternions can effectively exploit the strong correlation among the RGB channels, leading to enhanced performance. Especially, color image inpainting tasks are highly beneficial from the application of quaternion matrix completion techniques, in recent years. However, existing quaternion matrix completion methods suffer from two major drawbacks. First, it can be difficult to choose a regularizer that captures the common characteristics of natural images, and sometimes the regularizer that is chosen based on empirical evidence may not be the optimal or efficient option. Second, the optimization process of quaternion matrix completion models is quite challenging because of the non-commutativity of quaternion multiplication. To address the two drawbacks of the existing quaternion matrix completion approaches mentioned above, this paper tends to use an untrained quaternion convolutional neural network (QCNN) to directly generate the completed quaternion matrix. This approach replaces the explicit regularization term in the quaternion matrix completion model with an implicit prior that is learned by the QCNN. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method for color image inpainting compared with some existing quaternion-based and tensor -based methods.