Scalable Deep Color Quantization: a Cluster Imitation Approach

Color quantization reduces the number of colors used in an image while preserving its content, which is essential in pixel art and knitting art creation. Traditional methods primarily focus on visual fidelity and treat it as a clustering problem in the RGB space. While effective in large (5-6 bits) color spaces, these approaches cannot guarantee semantics in small (1-2 bits) color spaces. On the other hand, deep color quantization methods use network viewers such as AlexNet and ResNet for supervision, effectively preserving semantics in small color spaces. However, in large color spaces, they lag behind traditional methods in terms of visual fidelity. In this work, we propose ColorCNN+, a novel approach that combines the strengths of both. It uses network viewer signals for supervision in small color spaces and learns to cluster the colors in large color spaces. Noteworthily, it is non-trivial for neural networks to do clustering, where existing deep clustering methods often need K-means to cluster the features. In this work, through a newly introduced cluster imitation loss, ColorCNN+ learns to directly output the cluster assignment without any additional steps. Furthermore, ColorCNN+ supports multiple color space sizes and network viewers, offering scalability and easy deployment. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance of ColorCNN+ across various settings. Code is available at link.