Color Image Quantization: An Overview

Color quantization is a process of reducing the number of colors in an image to a limited number of representative colors while keeping the perceived difference between an original image and its quantized image as low as possible. It is a key task in visual information processing. A digital image is usually described by a set of pixels. A true-type color image consists of more than 16 million different colors. It is easier to understand and process an image with a low number of colors. So it is needed for color quantization in transmission, compression, presentation, segmentation or retrieval of visual information. The present paper overview the process of color image quantization.