The Color Monogenic Signal: Application to Color Edge Detection and Color Optical Flow

The aim of this paper is to define an extension of the analytic signal for a color image. We generalize the construction of the so-called monogenic signal to mappings with values in the vectorial part of the Clifford algebra R-5,R-0. Solving a Dirac equation in this context leads to a multiscale signal (relatively to the Poisson scale-space) which contains both structure and color information. The color monogenic signal can be used in a wide range of applications. Two examples are detailed: the first one concerns a multiscale geometric segmentation with respect to a given color; the second one is devoted to the extraction of the optical flow from moving objects of a given color.