Fast color quantization using weighted sort-means clustering

Color quantization is an important operation with numerous applications in graphics and image processing. Most quantization methods are essentially based on data clustering algorithms. However, despite its popularity as a general purpose clustering algorithm, K-means has not received much respect in the color quantization literature because of its high computational requirements and sensitivity to initialization. In this paper, a fast color quantization method based on K-means is presented. The method involves several modifications to the conventional (batch) K-means algorithm, including data reduction, sample weighting, and the use of the triangle inequality to speed up the nearest-neighbor search. Experiments on a diverse set of images demonstrate that, with the proposed modifications, K-means becomes very competitive with state-of-the-art color quantization methods in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America