rgb_to_quaternion — QUAT convert op

Data kinds: rgbimageqimage

Call: import quatimage; quatimage.rgb_to_quaternion(image_rgb) -> 'np.ndarray' (or opsquat.get("rgb_to_quaternion"))

Usage

Embed a colour image as pure quaternions `0 + R i + G j + B k`. → (H, W, 4).

Sangwine's 1996 encoding, and the entry point of the whole colour half of

this module: once a pixel is a quaternion, `q x conj(q)` rotates its colour

and :func:qft2 transforms the three channels as one hypercomplex signal

instead of three unrelated real ones.

The scalar (`w`) component is set to exactly zero — a *pure* quaternion —

because that is what makes the conjugation a 3-D rotation. Values are not

clamped: linear RGB after black-level subtraction legitimately goes negative,

and clipping it would change the colour direction, which is the quantity

every operator downstream reads.

Raises `ValueError: *image_rgb* is not a finite (H, W, 3)` numeric

array, is complex / bool / string-typed / masked, or exceeds

:data:MAX_PIXELS.

Detailed usage guide

quaternion_monogenic family guide

References (sample data, literature)

• Sample-data catalog (download URLs / licences) — 2-D uses skimage.data (BSD/public domain) plus synthetic images; 3-D lists download URLs for real data sources (Stanford, PDS, …).

• Operator provenance and references — the sources of the research/methods this op family came from.

• The canonical algorithm (author, year) and its uses are named in the family usage guide above.

Runnable examples (verified samples that actually call this op)

quaternion_monogenicpy -3.11 examples/quaternion_monogenic.py

Ops the type connects to (they accept qimage as input)

quaternion_to_rgb · quat_norm · quat_conjugate_image · quat_normalize_image · quat_image_multiply · monogenic_amplitude · monogenic_phase · monogenic_orientation

Same category (convert)

quaternion_to_rgb · quat_norm


*Provenance: quatimage.py — QUAT operator registry. This per-op note is generated by tools/opdocs.py md (do not hand-edit).*

© 2026 Kazufumi Furuse — Fullseye operator documentation. Licensed under Apache-2.0.