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])

tb_quat_color_filter: input → output

*The figure is the actual output on a synthetic 128×128 input. Left: input, right: output. Point clouds are drawn as a top-down scatter (brightness = z), 1-D series as a line plot, volumes as the maximum-intensity projection along z, videos as the middle frame, complex images as magnitude; return values that are not pictures are shown as the values themselves.*

*Knob a does not change the output (measured: identical at 0.1 / 0.5 / 0.9).*

*Knob b does not change the output (measured: identical at 0.1 / 0.5 / 0.9).*

Stages (the ops that come before → this op, left to right):

tb_quat_color_filter: stages (docs site)

On other images (synthetic scene / photo / coins. Top row: inputs, bottom row: their outputs. Knobs at default):

tb_quat_color_filter: other inputs (docs site)

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

-----------------------------------------------------------------

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

---------------------------------------------------

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.

Try it in Studio

The program below has been verified to run (same input as the figure). In Studio's help this block becomes buttons that load and run it on the spot.

img_to_rgb 0.50 0.50
tb_rgb_to_quaternion 0.50 0.50
tb_quat_color_filter 0.50 0.50

▸ Load this pipeline  ·  Load & run

Runnable examples (verified samples that actually call this op)

The examples below call the underlying ledger op quat_color_filter. This bridge op is the same implementation adapted to the fn(v, a, b) convention, so the behaviour carries over unchanged (only the call form differs).

quaternion_monogenicpy -3.11 examples/quaternion_monogenic.py

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_project_points · tb_render_point_depth · tb_statistical_outlier_removal · tb_radius_outlier_removal · tb_voxel_grid_downsample


*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.