A Hybrid Color Image Quantization Algorithm Based on k-Means and Harmony Search Algorithms

Color quantization is one of the most important preprocessing stages in many applications in computer graphics and image processing. In this article, a new algorithm for color image quantization based on the harmony search (HS) algorithm is proposed. The proposed algorithm utilizes the clustering method, which is one of the most extensively applied methods to the color quantization problem. Two variants of the algorithm are examined. The first is based on a standalone HS algorithm, and the second is a hybrid algorithm of k-means (KM) and HS. The objective of the hybrid algorithm is to strengthen the local search process and balance the quantization quality and computational complexity. In the first stage, the high-resolution color space is initially condensed to a lower-dimensional color space by multilevel thresholding. In the second stage, the compressed colors are clustered to a palette using the hybrid KMHS to obtain final quantization results. The algorithm aims to design a postclustering quantization scheme at the color-space level instead of the pixel level. This significantly reduces the computational complexity while maintaining the quantization quality. Experimental results on some of the most commonly used test images in the quantization literature demonstrate that the proposed method is a powerful method, suggesting a higher degree of precision and robustness compared to existing algorithms.