On the Efficacy and High-Performance Implementation of Quaternion Matrix Multiplication

Quaternion symmetry is ubiquitous in the physical sciences. As such, much work has been afforded over the years to the development of efficient schemes to exploit this symmetry using real and complex linear algebra. Recent years have also seen many advances in the formal theoretical development of explicitly quaternion linear algebra with promising applications in image processing and machine learning. Despite these advances, there do not currently exist optimized software implementations of quaternion linear algebra. The leverage of optimized linear algebra software is crucial in the achievement of high levels of performance on modern computing architectures, and thus provides a central tool in the development of high-performance scientific software. In this work, a case will be made for the efficacy of high-performance quaternion linear algebra software for appropriate problems. In this pursuit, an optimized software implementation of quaternion matrix multiplication will be presented and will be shown to outperform a vendor tuned implementation for the analogous complex matrix operation. The results of this work pave the path for further development of high-performance quaternion linear algebra software which will improve the performance of the next generation of applicable scientific applications

Color image classification via quaternion principal component analysis network

International audienceThe principal component analysis network (PCANet), which is one of the recently proposed deep learning architectures, achieves the state-of-the-art classification accuracy in various datasets and reveals a simple baseline for deep learning networks. However, the performance of PCANet may be degraded when dealing with color images due to the fact that the architecture of PCANet cannot properly utilize the spatial relationship between each color channel in three dimensional color image. In this paper, a quaternion principal component analysis network (QPCANet), which extends PCANet by using quaternion theory, is proposed for color image classification. Compared to PCANet, the proposed QPCANet takes into account the spatial distribution information of RGB channels in color images and ensures larger amount of intra-class invariance by using quaternion domain representation for color images. Experiments conducted on different color image datasets such as UC Merced Land Use, Georgia Tech face, CURet and Caltech-101 have revealed that the proposed QPCANet generally achieves higher classification accuracy than PCANet in color image classification task. The experimental results also verify that QPCANet has much better rotation invariance than PCANet when color image dataset contains lots of rotation information and demonstrate even a simple one-layer QPCANet may obtain satisfactory accuracy when compared with two-layer PCANet