Fast color quantization by K-Means clustering combined with image sampling

Color image quantization has become an important operation often used in tasks of color image processing. There is a need for quantization methods that are fast and at the same time generating high quality quantized images. This paper presents such color quantization method based on downsampling of original image and K-Means clustering on a downsampled image. The nearest neighbor interpolation was used in the downsampling process and Wu's algorithm was applied for deterministic initialization of K-Means. Comparisons with other methods based on a limited sample of pixels (coreset-based algorithm) showed an advantage of the proposed method. This method significantly accelerated the color quantization without noticeable loss of image quality. The experimental results obtained on 24 color images from the Kodak image dataset demonstrated the advantages of the proposed method. Three quality indices (MSE, DSCSI and HPSI) were used in the assessment process.