The field of deep learning has seen significant advancement in recent years. However, much of the existing work has been focused on real-valued numbers. Recent work has shown that a deep learning system using the complex numbers can be deeper for a fixed parameter budget compared to its real-valued counterpart. In this work, we explore the benefits of generalizing one step further into the hyper-complex numbers, quaternions specifically, and provide the architecture components needed to build deep quaternion networks. We develop the theoretical basis by reviewing quaternion convolutions, developing a novel quaternion weight initialization scheme, and developing novel algorithms for quaternion batch-normalization. These pieces are tested in a classification model by end-to-end training on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 data sets and a segmentation model by end-to-end training on the KITTI Road Segmentation data set. These quaternion networks show improved convergence compared to real-valued and complex-valued networks, especially on the segmentation task, while having fewer parameters
A quaternionic extension of feed forward neural network, for processing multi-dimensional signals, is proposed in this paper. This neural network is based on the three layered network with random weights, called Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs), in which iterative least-mean-square algorithms are not required for training networks. All parameters and variables in the proposed network are encoded by quaternions and operations among them follow the quaternion algebra. Neurons in the proposed network are expected to operate multi-dimensional signals as single entities, rather than real-valued neurons deal with each element of signals independently. The performances for the proposed network are evaluated through two types of experiments: classifications and reconstructions for color images in the CIFAR-10 dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed networks are superior in terms of classification accuracies for input images than the conventional (real-valued) networks with similar degrees of freedom. The detailed investigations for operations in the proposed networks are conducted. HighlightsA feedforward neural network for accepting three- or four-dimension is proposed.Quaternions, which are a four-dimensional hypercomlex numbers, are used for encoding neuronal parameters.Its performances are evaluated through the classification and autoencoding for CIFAR-10 dataset.