Color quantization with Particle swarm optimization and artificial ants

Abstract

[EN]This article describes a color quantization algorithm that combines two swarm-based methods: Particle swarm optimization and artificial ants. The proposed method is based on a previous method that solves the quantization problem by combining the Particle swarm optimization algorithm with the K-means algorithm. K-means is a popular clustering method that has been applied to solve a variety of problems, including the color quantization problem. Nevertheless, it is a time-consuming method, which makes combining the Particle swarm optimization algorithm and K-means less suitable than other color quantization techniques. The proposed method, however, discards the K-means algorithm and applies the Ant-tree for color quantization algorithm in order to reduce execution time. This article shows that the new method outperforms the original one, since it requires less time to obtain higher quality images. In addition, the images produced are also of better quality than those produced by other well-known color quantization methods, such as Neuquant, Octree, Median-cut, Variance-based, Binary splitting and Wu’s methods.