INFORMATICA, 2014, Vol. 25, No. 3, 485–503 485 2014 Vilnius University DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/Informatica.2014.25 Color Image Quantization: A Short Review and an Application with Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm Celal OZTURK∗, Emrah HANCER, Dervis KARABOGA Department of Computer Engineering, Erciyes University, Kayseri, 38039, Turkey e-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] Received: December 2012; accepted: July 2013 Abstract. Color quantization is the process of reducing the number of colors in a digital image. The main objective of quantization process is that significant information should be preserved while reducing the color of an image. In other words, quantization process shouldn’t cause significant information loss in the image. In this paper, a short review of color quantization is presented and a new color quantization method based on artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) is proposed. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by comparing it with the performance of the most widely used quantization methods such as K-means, Fuzzy C Means (FCM), minimum variance and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The obtained results indicate that the proposed method is superior to the others. Key words: color quantization, artificial bee colony, particle swarm optimization, K-means, fuzzy C means. 1. Introduction It is known that high quality images can be displayed and stored without much effort with the rapid development of computer software and hardware. However, these images can contain a huge amount of detailed information causing transfer time and processing problems. In order to avoid these problems, unnecessaryinformationshould be eliminated from images with some pre-processing methods before processing and transmission.