Effective colour reduction using Grey Wolf Optimisation

Abstract

Colour reduction algorithms allow displaying or processing true colour images using a limited palette of distinct colours. Clearly, the colours that make up the palette are important as they determine the quality of the resulting image. Colour quantisation can also be seen as an optimisation problem where the task is to identify those colours that will lead to the best possible resulting image quality. In this paper, we utilise a recent meta-heuristic optimisation algorithm, Grey Wolf Optimisation, for colour reduction of images. Experimental results on a benchmark set of images confirm that our approach performs significantly better than other, purpose built colour quantisation algorithms.