Joint Color Quantization and Dithering Techniques

Abstract

Color quantization process is considered in two stages: the selection of an optimal color palette and the mapping of each pixel of the image to a color from the color palette. Since the color palette is limited, some disturbing degradations such as false contours are visible on delivered color quantized images. A common way to overcome this problem is the use of dithering techniques. In this paper, two methods for color quantization are proposed for the use with color dithering techniques in a way that better results will be obtained after dithering. The results show that the proposed methods, when used with dithering techniques, significantly improve the visual quality of the resulting color quantized images compared to the traditional color quantization algorithms.