Abstract: To make the detail of color images outstanding, highly visible, an image enhancement method based on the quaternion guided filter was proposed. First, the traditional guided filter was extended to quaternion field, and the guided filter based on quaternion was obtained. Then, the original color image was modeled in a quaternion matrix form, and the quaternion-value of the image was processed through quaternion guided filter. Furthermore, image layering was adopted to decompose a source image into a base image and a detail image, and the detail image was enhanced by self-adaptive enhancement transform. Finally, the base image and the detail-enhanced image were reconstructed to obtain an enhanced image. Experimental results show that the proposed method can produce high-quality detail enhancement. It not only makes image's edges more prominent and textures clearer, but also keeps color fidelity. Comparing with the existing enhancement methods, our proposed method improves the visual quality significantly and the objective evaluating indicators are also greatly improved.