Fast Trellis-Coded Color Quantization of Images

We examine color quantization of images using trellis-coded quantization (TCQ) in both the RGB domain and YUV domain. Together with a simple dithering scheme, an eight-bit trellis-coded color quantizer reproduces images that are visually indistinguishable from the 24-bit originals. It can be viewed as a predictive trellis-coded color quantization scheme. We also study trellis-coded vector quantization (TCVQ) for color quantization. Our proposed TCQ-based color quantization schemes are universal in the sense that no training or look-up table is needed. The complexity of TCQ is linear with respect to image size, making trellis-coded color quantization suitable for color printing, real-time interactive graphics and window-based display environment.