Annual Conference on New Trends in Information & Communications Technology Applications-(NTICT'2017)
7 - 9 March 2017
An Efficient Color Quantization Using Color
Histogram
Sarmad Omar Abter
Dept. of Computer Science\ College of Science
University of Baghdad
Baghdad, Iraq
Sarmadomar88@scbaghdad.edu.iq
Abstract—The color reduction or color quantization is
needed for many reasons such as, to compress the high-
resolution images which take a lot of the disk space and to
easily view the images on the screens that do not support a
large number of color ranges (low-resolution Screens).
Color quantization generates a new image, which has less
number of colors, but the difference between the
Quantized Image and the original image is small. In this
work, a quantization algorithm is proposed that based on
the color histogram for true color images. Also, the images
can be quantized to a different number of colors. The
algorithm is applied to many images of (CorelDB) dataset,
the results show that the algorithm is high speed due to the
low computational cost and, the quality of quantized
images is very good.
Index Terms— color reduction, histogram analysis,
Image quantization
I. INTRODUCTION
A true-color image consists of a pixel matrix
that each pixel consists of triple color component (red,
green, blue), each one of the triple components of the
pixel represents the brightness of the color that is
represented. Each component of the pixel value is of
range [0...255] then each color component has a 224
variation of colors. Since the computer screen is not
capable of displaying many colors at the same time, the
reduction of the images colors become one of the
interesting subjects to be studied on the color image
display, transmission of the images through networks,
compression the size of the image. The color
quantization means gathering the similar colors in a
group and then replacing these colors in the group with
one of the group colors. Any color quantization
algorithm consists of two main steps, the first step is the
build or forming the "color palette" of the image, the
second step is the operation of building the mapping
table which is used to generate the quantized image [1].
There are two kinds of color palette creating methods:
"image independent" methods and "image dependent"
methods. "Image independent" method generates
978-1-5386-2962-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Assist. Prof. Dr. Nada A.Z. Abdullah
Dept. of Computer Science\ College of Science
University of Baghdad
Baghdad, Iraq
nadaazah@scbaghdad.edu.iq
palette for the quantized image without considering any
specific image contents, while "image dependent"
methods generate palettes for the quantized image based
on the color distribution within the original image. The
image independent method is fast but produces usually
poor quantization results because it does not consider
the contents of the image. To maintain the quality of
image representation, most of the current works on
"color quantization" fall on "image dependent" methods.
[2]
For the image, dependent methods, there are two
different strategies to construct "color palette": "pre-
clustering" and "post-clustering". The "pre-clustering"
strategy partitions the original image colors into
multiple subspaces based on the statistics of color
distribution. The "post-clustering" strategy begins color
quantization with an initial palette and improves it
iteratively. From the above," the challenge to color
image quantization is to balance the quantization quality
and computational complexity". [3]
In general, there are three main types for "color
quantization"; the first type is the "vector quantization".
It can be applied to quantize each pixel's color in three-
dimensional vector consisting of the three-color
components as (red, green and blue).
The second type is the color clustering method for
finding the "color palette" of the image. The typical
method of the clustering type is the "Neural Network"
for "Optimal Color Quantization"[4].
The third type of "color quantization" is the type in which the
color space is divided into smaller sub-areas and then the best
color will be chosen in each sub-area to construct the "color
a palette" of the image [5].
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 Annual Conference on New Trends in Information & Communications Technology Applications-(NTICT'2017)
7 - 9 March 2017
II. RELATED WORK
A lot of algorithms are proposed to construct a color
map with a specific number of colors that are selected at
the beginning of the algorithm. One of the earliest
methods to reduce the "color palette" is the population
method, which is developed by Boyle and Lippmann in
1978, another quantization method which implemented
later is the "median-cut algorithm" which groups the
colors of the image into sets by dividing each group at
the median point of the set [1]. Another famous method
is the "octree quantization algorithm" [6]. Other
quantization techniques are based on the analysis of
histogram [4, 7, 8], soft computing [9-10]. Methods that
produce images with high-quality quantization construct
the set of representative colors according to the color
distribution of the original image, where the chosen
quantization regions are selected according to a given
criterion. These methods are " image dependent" [9-15].
because that each true-color image generally has a large
number of colors, which makes the quantization method
is too complex and hard to implement, most of the
"color quantization" methods has a preprocessing step to
minimize the data that will be processed by the
quantization algorithm [9, 16].
III. THE PROPOSED COLOR QUANTIZATION ALGORITHM
The proposed algorithm in this work depends
on the image histogram, since the histogram can show
the colors that are occurred most frequently, and these
colors can be used to perform quantization. The method
which is used in the implementation is divided into two
stages of processing the first step is to calculate the
color palette of the original image using color histogram
as demonstrated in the algorithm (1), the histogram
calculation takes the value of (R, G, B) in the image and
compute its occurrence in the image.
The second stage of the quantization process is to take
the color histogram of the original image that is
calculated in the first stage, and divided the histogram
into a number of regions based on the number of colors
needed in the quantized image; the division is decided
by the following equation:
NPR=NP/NR ……….(1)
Where
NPR= number of pixels in region
NP =number of pixels of the image
NR =number of regions
Then the colors on the regions are spread by sum the
occurrence value of each color until the pixel count of the
region is occupied, at the end of each region the number of
pixels of the next region is calculated as in the following
equations:
newNP=NP-NPR ……..…..………..(2)
newNR=NR-1 ………………….(3)
newNPR=newNP/newNR..………...(4)
Where
NPR= number of pixels in previous region
NP =number of pixels of the image
newNP =number of pixels of unprocessed colors
NR =number of regions
newNR =number of remaining regions
newNPR= number of pixels in next region
From each region one color is selected which has
maximum occurrence in the region, the output after
processing all regions is a vector of the maximum
occurrence colors in the image. This vector is used to
complete the quantization by preparing a mapping table.
Each color in the original image is substituted by
nearest color in the maximum occurrence colors.
The Euclidian Distance(ED) is used to compute the
similarity between two colors. The following is the ED
equation:
… (5)
Algorithm (1): Histogram Calculation
Input: colored image with the colored objects // BMP image file
Output: histogram table// table of colors occurrence in the image
Begin
Step1: Load the image from the file
Imageload(imagepath)
Step2: scan all the pixels of the images and store the colors of the
pixel in the Table
For all rows from 0 to width of the image do
For all columns from 0 to height of the image do
Get the pixel color in the row and column location
If pixelcolor is in the Table then
Add 1 to the value of that color
Else
Add the color to the Table and set it to 1
End For
End For
End
Algorithm (2): Proposed Color Quantization
Objectives: Reduce the Colors in the Image
Input: bmp //color image
Region_no //number of colors we want to minimize the
original number of colors of the image to it.
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 Annual Conference on New Trends in Information & Communications Technology Applications-(NTICT'2017)
7 - 9 March 2017
Output: Quantized image. classes in the dataset and as shown in the figures that
the images have good quality after applying the
Begin quantization and keeps most of it is details after the
Step1: Calculate the Histogram for the colors of the image using quantization is applied.
algorithm (1).
Step2: Find the number of pixels in each region.
Set Sum_allmnumber of pixels of the image.
Set no_of_pixelsmSum_all / Region_no // determine the number
of pixels in each region
Set ci m 0 // Histogram Color Index.
Set sum1= Sum_all
Step3: Determine the colors in each region and find the max color of
each region.
For I from 0 to Region_no do
Begin
Set counter m 0 // number of colors in each region.
Set sum m0 // sum of pixels of the colors in each region.
Set max_color mcolor[ci]// set the maximum color of
the region
Set max_pixel mpixel[ci] // set the maximum pixel of
the maximum color
While sum <no_of_pixels do // sum the number of pixels
of each color in the histogram until the number of pixels of
the region is reached
Figure 1: The Results after Applied the algorithm on Image
Begin
Sum msum + Pixel_no from Class 'Car'
If max_pixel <pixel[ci] do
Set max_color m color[ci]
Set max_pixelm pixel[ci]
Ci+1 // increment the color index.
Counter +1 // increment the counter of colors in the
region.
End
Set sum1 msum1 – sum// subtract the sum of pixels of the
first region from the sum of all pixels in the image.
Set no_of_pixelsmsum1/ (Region_no-1) // determine the number of
pixels in each region.
Max_array[i] m max_color // add the maximum color in
each region to array.
No_colors[i] m counter // add the number of colors in each
region into No_colors array.
End
Step4: Find the distance of each color in the histogram and the
colors of the Max_array to find the nearest max color to it using
equation (1)

Step5: create the mapping table by adding the color and the nearest Figure 2: The Results After Applied the algorithm on Image
max color corresponding to it to the table
from Class 'Bus'
Step6: set the colors of the image according to the mapping table.
End;

IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND D ISCUSSION

Proposed quantization algorithm was applied to a large
number of images with a different color number, taken
from the available database for color images
(CorelDB)a free image dataset that contains 10,800
images in 80 different Classes (e.g. car, castle, bus,
aviation and etc.). Color images are of size 120*80
(24bits).
We applied the algorithm to reduce the colors of the
original image from 9600 colors into (256,128,64,32,16)
colors respectively as illustrated in the figures (1), (2),
and (3) that show the results of the algorithm after
applying it on sample images from three random image

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 Annual Conference on New Trends in Information & Communications Technology Applications-(NTICT'2017)
7 - 9 March 2017
Figure 3: The Results after Applied the algorithm on Image introduced a loss color reduction algorithm which
from Class 'Flower' reduces the number of colors in any image (with any
number of colors) while maintaining the quality of the
To evaluate the performances of proposed algorithm the mean quantized image. The algorithm is based on the analysis
square quantized error was chosen which is defined by the of the color histogram. The histogram is divided into a
following equation: number of regions according to the colors in the new
MSE image. The colors with the most pixels in each region
are used to be the base colors to the new palette. Other
colors are assigned to the nearest color of the new
Where
palette. The results show that the algorithm is simple,
N represents the height of the image
speed and produce high-quality images.
M represents the width of the image
As future work the use of another color spaces such as HSV
( ) represents the pixel of the original image
which may increase the performance of the proposed method.
( ) represents the pixel of the quantized image Moreover, the use of other distance metrics may lead to better
Table (1), (2), and (3) show the mean square error between the results.
original image and the quantized image for the three images
(car, bus, flower) respectively, with a different number of VI. REFERENCES
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