A self-organizing map with dynamic architecture for efficient color quantization

Color quantization is often used to convert 24-bit RGB images to 8-bit palette-table images. However, in some cases, the imposed 8 bits per pixel may be too stringent to adequately represent the image. For other images, 8 bits per pixel are unnecessarily generous. For image storage and transmission, it is important to compress an image as much as possible without exceeding an allowable level of degradation. The paper describes the use of a dynamically-growing self-organizing map (SOM) to determine the palette-table required to adequately represent the colors of an RGB image, given an allowable degree of quantization error.