Dependent scalar quantization of color images

Many image display devices can allow only a limited number of colors, called color palette, to be simultaneously displayed. In order to have a faithful color reproduction of an image, the associated color palette must be suitably designed. This paper presents a dependent scalar quantization algorithm to design the color palette effectively. The dependent scalar quantization algorithm consists of two procedures, bit allocation and recursive binary moment preserving thresholding. The experimental results show that the dependent scalar quantization can reduce the computation complexity and its output images quality is acceptable to the human eyes. A rule of the quantization order is also deduced under the MSE criterion to obtain a dependent scalar quantizer which has as good a performance as compared with some other algorithms. In addition, an adaptive neighborhood-clustering algorithm, which searches the neighboring color indices of input pixels iteratively, is proposed to further improve the performance of the dependent scalar quantization algorithm. Finally, we introduce a color mapping method to reduce the contouring effect when the color palette size generated by the dependent scalar quantizer is small