Abstract: A method includes extracting multiple shallow features from a low-resolution image using a shallow feature extractor that includes a quaternion convolutional network. The method also includes extracting multiple deep features from the multiple shallow features using a deep feature extractor that includes multiple quaternion residual distillation blocks (QRDBs), where each QRDB includes a quaternion self-attention module. The method further includes reconstructing the multiple deep features into a high-resolution image. Each QRDB may further include a quaternion gated deconvolutional feed forward network (QGDFN) configured to suppress one or more of the multiple deep features.