Quaternion linear color edge-glowing filter using genetic algorithm

Abstract

This paper presents a quaternion linear color edge-glowing filter, based on a zooming technique using a genetic algorithm (GA) and quaternion (hypercomplex) convolution, to create a mask of the proposed filter. The zooming technique helps to produce the glowing color edges in all directions, with only one mask, and the GA helps to find the coefficients of the filter mask. This was a challenge with previous mathematical frameworks. The proposed filter employs linear color vector filtering operations on images. This converts the areas of smoothly-varying colors into black and generates glowing color edges in regions where color (but not intensity) edges occur in the image. The filter has been tested on different types of color images; the experimental results show that the proposed filter is a great advance towards the development of linear color vector image filtering. The computation time for the GA is about 1 h, which is very reasonable. The novelty of this filter is that one mask is enough for producing glowing color edges in all directions.