Quaternion-Aware Low-Rank Prior for Blind Color Image Deblurring

Blind image deblurring is a critical and challenging task in the field of imaging science due to its severe ill-posedness. Appropriate prior information and regularizations are normally introduced to alleviate this problem. Inspired by the fact that the matrix representing a natural image is intrinsically low-rank or approximately low-rank, we employ the low-rank matrix approximation (LRMA) approach for tackling blind image deblurring problems with unknown kernels. When applied to color image restoration tasks, making use of the quaternion representation in the hypercomplex domain enables us to better illustrate the inner relationships among color channels and thus more accurately characterize color image structure. Following this idea, we develop a novel model for color image blind deblurring by implementing the quaternion representation to the LRMA method. This proposed model facilitates better results for blur kernel estimation through preserving the sharper color intermediate latent image, which is first implemented for addressing the blind color image deblurring problem. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed quaternion-aware low-rank prior model greatly improves the performance when compared with the conventional low-rank based scheme and outperforms some of the state-of-the-art methods in terms of some criteria and visual quality.