Contextual color quantization algorithm

We propose an heuristic approach to color-quantize images with contextual information taken into consideration. The idea is to locate the regions of an image having the greatest need for colors, and allocate more quantization levels to them. We achieve this by scanning the elements of the input image in a way determined by their local intensity and select the color representatives that comprise the color map according to their local popularity. The overall performance of the color quantization algorithm is evaluated on representative set of artificial and real-world images. The results show a significant image quality improvement compared to some of the other color quantization schemes.