Perceptual-based color quantization

The paper presents a method for color quantization (CQ) which uses visual contrast for determining an image-dependent color palette. The proposed method selects image regions in a hierarchical way, according to the visual importance of their colors with respect to the whole image. The method is automatic, image dependent and requires a moderate computational effort. Preliminary results show that the quality of quantized images, measured in terms of Mean Square Error, Color Loss and SSIM, is competitive with some existing CQ approaches.