  Recent developments in quaternion-valued widely linear processing have
established that the exploitation of complete second-order statistics requires
consideration of both the standard covariance and the three complementary
covariance matrices. Although such matrices have a tremendous amount of
structure and their decomposition is a powerful tool in a variety of
applications, the non-commutative nature of the quaternion product has been
prohibitive to the development of quaternion uncorrelating transforms. To this
end, we introduce novel techniques for a simultaneous decomposition of the
covariance and complementary covariance matrices in the quaternion domain,
whereby the quaternion version of the Takagi factorisation is explored to
diagonalise symmetric quaternion-valued matrices. This gives new insights into
the quaternion uncorrelating transform (QUT) and forms a basis for the proposed
quaternion approximate uncorrelating transform (QAUT) which simultaneously
diagonalises all four covariance matrices associated with improper quaternion
signals. The effectiveness of the proposed uncorrelating transforms is
validated by simulations on both synthetic and real-world quaternion-valued
signals.
