JELE_V1_N2_RP6 B.D. Venkatramana Reddy T. Jayachandra Prasad Journal on Electronics Engineering 2249 – 0760 1 2 41 47 Colour Image Compression, Quaternions, Singular Value Decomposition In this paper, the authors first discuss the quaternion representation of colour images and quaternion matrix algebra. Colour images consisting of the three RGB channels can be represented using pure quaternion-valued pixels. Then, to perform the decomposition of such colour images, they introduce the singular value decomposition of a quaternion matrix which represents a colour image. Finally, based on this decomposition they proposed a method for colour image compression without separating the colour image into three channel images. Results of the compression on three different colour images are presented. December 2010 - February 2011 Copyright © 2011 i-manager publications. All rights reserved. i-manager Publications http://www.imanagerpublications.com/Article.aspx?ArticleId=1370