tb_quat_color_filter — 2D typed op

Data kinds: qimageqimage

Call: fullseye.apply(img, "tb_quat_color_filter", a=0.5, b=0.5) (the 2-D model is one image plus two scalar knobs a,b∈[0,1])

Usage

Keep or remove one colour direction, exactly. → (H, W, 4).

`mode="remove" returns v - (v.g) g for the unit RGB direction g`:

the component along `g` is exactly zero everywhere afterwards, to

machine precision (measured max residual 5.8e-16 and 6.5e-16 on two random

colour images — seed-dependent only at the 1e-16 level),

and `remove + keep` reproduces the input to 0.0 exactly.

`mode="keep" returns the complementary (v.g) g`. The scalar part is

passed through untouched in both.

There is no default mode. The two are opposites, both return a valid

picture, and neither raises — so choosing for the caller would be a coin flip

that never announces itself.

Not a new algorithm, and this docstring will not pretend otherwise

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The `remove` branch is the specular-invariant projection of Mallick et

al. (2005), which this repository already implements as

`specularity.specular_free_transform for the rgbimage` sort. Rather

than write the same three lines twice, this operator *delegates* to it — so

agreement between the two sorts is by construction rather than by luck, and a

future fix in one is a fix in both. What is added here is the `keep`

branch (which has no counterpart there) and the `qimage` sort, so the

projection composes with :func:quat_color_rotate and :func:qft2.

What this can do that a channelwise pipeline cannot

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A per-channel filter applies a diagonal matrix, and `I - g g^T` is diagonal

only when `g is a coordinate axis. For g = (1,1,1)/sqrt(3)` — remove

the grey axis, i.e. keep only chromatic content — the *best possible*

diagonal approximation is off by `||P - diag(P)||_2 = 0.666667` in operator

norm. Concretely, a pure red pixel `(1, 0, 0)` must become

`(0.666667, -0.333333, -0.333333)`; the best diagonal filter can only reach

`(0.666667, 0, 0), an error of 0.471405` — it cannot put anything into

the green and blue channels, because it multiplies each channel by a number

and both start at zero. The impossibility is structural, not a tuning gap.

(A full 3x3 colour matrix, of course, does it exactly; see

:func:quat_color_rotate for that half of the accounting.)

Raises `ValueError: *qimage* is not a valid (H, W, 4)` field;

*direction_rgb* is not a finite non-zero 3-vector; *mode* is not

`'remove' / 'keep'`.

Typed bridge of the quat op `quat_color_filter into the 2-D evolution registry: the same implementation, called under the op(v, a, b) convention. This op has no tunable parameter; a and b` are unused.

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.

Runnable examples (verified samples that actually call this op)

• (none yet)

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

identity · tb_quaternion_to_rgb · tb_quat_norm · tb_quat_conjugate_image · tb_quat_normalize_image · tb_monogenic_amplitude · tb_monogenic_phase · tb_monogenic_orientation

Same category (typed)

tb_points_to_voxel · tb_estimate_point_normals · tb_iss_keypoints · tb_angle_3points · tb_project_points · tb_render_point_depth · tb_statistical_outlier_removal · tb_radius_outlier_removal


*Provenance: ops.py — 2D 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.