Color image quantization using flower pollination algorithm

Flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is a swarm-based optimization technique that has attracted the attention of many researchers in several optimization fields due to its impressive characteristics. This paper proposes a new application for FPA in the field of image processing to solve the color quantization problem, which is use the mean square error is selected as the objective function of the optimization color quantization problem to be solved. By comparing with the K-means and other swarm intelligence techniques, the proposed FPA for Color Image Quantization algorithm is verified. Computational results show that the proposed method can generate a quantized image with low computational cost. Moreover, the quality of the image generated is better than that of the images obtained by six well-known color quantization methods.