Color Image Inpainting via Robust Pure Quaternion Matrix Completion: Error Bound and Weighted Loss

In this paper, we study color image inpainting as a pure quaternion matrix completion problem. In the literature, the theoretical guarantee for quaternion matrix completion is not well established. Our main aim is to propose a new minimization problem with an objective combining nuclear norm and a quadratic loss weighted among three channels. To fill the theoretical vacancy, we obtain the error bound in both clean and corrupted regimes, which relies on some new results of quaternion matrices. A general Gaussian noise is considered in robust completion where all observations are corrupted. Motivated by the error bound, we propose to handle unbalanced or correlated noise via a cross-channel weight in the quadratic loss, with the main purpose of rebalancing noise level or removing noise correlation. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and color image data are presented to confirm and demonstrate our theoretical findings.