With the increasing amount of splicing images, many detection schemes of splicing images are proposed. In this paper, a splicing detection scheme for color image based on the quaternion discrete cosine transform (QDCT) is proposed. Firstly, the proposed quaternion Markov features are extracted in QDCT domain. Secondly, the proposed quaternion Markov features consist of global and local quaternion Markov, which utilize both magnitude and three phases to extract Markov features by using two different ways. In total, 2916-D features are extracted. Finally, the support vector machine (SVM) is used to detect the splicing images. In our experiments, the accuracy of the proposed scheme reaches 99.16% and 97.52% in CASIA TIDE v1.0 and CASIA TIDE v2.0, respectively, which exceeds that of the existing schemes.