Title: Optimal image colour extraction by differential evolution

Authors: Gerald Schaefer, Lars Nolle

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3TU, UK. ' School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK

Abstract: Differential evolution is an optimisation technique that has been successfully employed in various applications. In this paper, we apply differential evolution to the problem of extracting the optimal colours of a colour map for quantised images. The choice of entries in the colour map is crucial for the resulting image quality as it forms a look-up table that is used for all pixels in the image. We show that differential evolution can be effectively employed as a method for deriving the entries in the map. In order to optimise the image quality, our differential evolution approach is combined with a local search method that is guaranteed to find the local optimal colour map. This hybrid approach is shown to outperform various commonly used colour quantisation algorithms on a set of standard images.

Keywords: differential evolution; colour maps; colour quantisation; k-means clustering; hybrid optimisation; image colour extraction; image quality; local search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2010.033093

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2010 Vol.2 No.3/4, pp.251 - 257

Published online: 07 May 2010 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article