An Efficient Palette Generation Method for Color Image Quantization

Abstract

This article describes an efficient method to generate a color palette for color image quantization. The method consists of two stages. In the first stage, the initial palette is generated. Initially, the color palette is an empty set. First, the N colors are generated according to the data distribution of the input image in the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color space. Then, one color is selected from the N colors and this color is added to the initial palette, and the step is repeated until the color number of the initial palette is equal to K. In the second stage, the quantized image is generated using the fast K-means algorithm. There are many sampling rates used in this study. For each sampled pixel, a fast searching method is employed to efficiently determine the closest color in the palette. Experimental results show that the high-quality quantized images can be generated by the proposed method. When the sampling rate equals 0.125, the computation time of the proposed method is less than 0.3 s for all cases.