A new method for reconstructing the compressed sensing color image by solving an optimization problem based on total variation in the quaternion field is proposed, which can effectively improve the reconstructing ability of the color image. First, the color image is converted from RGB （red, green, blue） space to CMYK （cyan, magenta, yellow, black） space, which is assigned to a quaternion matrix. Meanwhile, the quaternion matrix is converted into the information of the phase and amplitude by the Euler form of the quatemion. Secondly, the phase and amplitude of the quatemion matrix are used as the smoothness constraints for the compressed sensing （CS） problem to make the reconstructing results more accurate. Finally, an iterative method based on gradient is used to solve the CS problem. Experimental results show that by considering the information of the phase and amplitude, the proposed method can achieve better performance than the existing method that treats the three components of the color image as independent parts.
