Generic black box optimisation algorithms for colour quantisation

Abstract

We apply a variant of Simulated Annealing (SA) as a standard black-box optimisation algorithm to the colour quantisation problem. The main advantage of black-box optimisation algorithms is that they do not require any domain specific knowledge yet are able to provide a near optimal solution. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by comparing its performance with several specialized colour quantisation algorithms. The results obtained show that even without any domain specific knowledge our SA based algorithm is able to outperform standard quantisation algorithms and hence to provide images with superior image quality.