Image hashing is one of the multimedia protection techniques. In this paper, a new method for robust image hashing based on quaternion polar complex exponential transform (QPCET) is proposed. The proposed method targets two goals. The first goal is the robustness against geometric and common signal processing attacks. The second one is authenticating color images without conversion which keeps their color information. In the proposed method, the input color image is normalized by the bicubic interpolation and then the interpolated image passes to Gaussian low-pass filter. QPCET moments are used to extract features. Finally, the hash value is calculated using the extracted features. On the sender side, a secret key is utilized to increase the protection of the hash value before transmitting it. The hash value is attached with the transmitted color image. On the receiver side, the authenticity of the received image is checked by decrypting the hash value. Euclidean distance is used to check the similarity between different hashes. Results of the conducted experiments prove the robustness of proposed hash against different geometric and signal processing attacks. Also, it preserves the content of the transmitted color image. Hashing different images has a very low collision probability which ensure the suitability of the proposed method for image authentication. Comparison with the existing methods ensures the superiority of the proposed method.