Color Image Analysis by Quaternion Zernike Moments

Moments and moment invariants are useful tool in pattern recognition and image analysis. Conventional methods to deal with color images are based on RGB decomposition or graying. In this paper, by using the theory of quaternions, we introduce a set of quaternion Zernike moments (QZMs) for color images in a holistic manner. It is shown that the QZMs can be obtained via the conventional Zernike moments of each channel. We also construct a set of combined invariants to rotation and translation (RT) using the modulus of central QZMs. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptors are more efficient than the existing ones.