The invention discloses a method for evaluating the quality of a full reference color image based on quaternion. The method includes the following steps: constructing a brightness channel component template of any pixel point; respectively calculating the local variance of an original reference color image and a to-be-evaluated distorted color image; obtaining a local variance V, a brightness channel L, a first color channel A and a second color channel B; taking V as a real portion of a quaternion matrix, and L, A, and B as virtual portions of the quaternion matrix, respectively constructing the quaternion matrix of the original reference color image and the to-be-evaluated distorted color image; conducting singular value decomposition on the quaternion matrices to obtain corresponding singular value characteristic vector; and calculating the Euler's distance of the singular value characteristic vectors, and taking the Euler's distance as the distortion level metric of the to-be-evaluated distorted color image. According to the invention, the method can better evaluate the distortion of the color image, requires less calculation, and can effectively increase the relativity between a subjective evaluation result and objective perception, and produces the result that has the precision as human eyes.