Adaptive Color Quantization Method with Multi-level Thresholding

In this study, a novel color quantization approach which automatically estimates the number of colors by multi-level thresholding based on the histogram is proposed. The method consists of three stages. First, red-green-blue is clustered by threshold values. Thus, the pixels are positioned in a cluster or sub-prism. Second, the color palette is produced by determining the centroids of the clusters. Finally, the pixels are reassigned to clusters based on their distance from each centroid. The average of the pixels included in each cluster also represents the color of that cluster. While conventional methods are user-dependent, the proposed algorithm automatically generates the number of colors by considering the pixels assigned to the clusters. Additionally, the multi-level thresholding approach is also a solution to the initialization problem, which is another important issue for quantization. Consequently, the experimental results of the method tested with various images show better performance than many frequently used quantization techniques.