Quaternion CNN With Salient Features for Color Image Denoising

Deep convolutional neural networks have significantly advanced color image denoising. However, existing models often apply grayscale denoising techniques to color images without accounting for inter-channel correlations, resulting in color distortion, detail loss, and visual artifacts. Moreover, these models frequently neglect salient features within convolutional maps. To address these issues, we propose a quaternion CNN model that captures channel correlations and extracts salient features, thereby enhancing color image denoising performance. Specifically, we convert color images into quaternion matrices to better capture these correlations and design a quaternion convolutional network to learn relevant features. Furthermore, an aggregated feature block is introduced to enhance the extraction of salient features and further refine the denoising process. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior performance compared to recent state-of-the-art methods.