Quaternion matrices are employed successfully in many color image processing applications. In particular, a pure quaternion matrix can be used to represent red, green and blue channels of color images. A low-rank approximation for a pure quaternion matrix can be obtained by using the quaternion singular value decomposition. However, this approximation is not optimal in the sense that the resulting low-rank approximation matrix may not be pure quaternion, i.e., the low-rank matrix contains real component which is not useful for the representation of a color image. The main contribution of this paper is to find an optimal rank-$r$ pure quaternion matrix approximation for a pure quaternion matrix (a color image). Our idea is to use a projection on a low-rank quaternion matrix manifold and a projection on a quaternion matrix with zero real component, and develop an alternating projections algorithm to find such optimal low-rank pure quaternion matrix approximation. The convergence of the projection algorithm can be established by showing that the low-rank quaternion matrix manifold and the zero real component quaternion matrix manifold has a non-trivial intersection point. Numerical examples on synthetic pure quaternion matrices and color images are presented to illustrate the projection algorithm can find optimal low-rank pure quaternion approximation for pure quaternion matrices or color images.
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