The hardware-based implementation of the colour palette generation stage of a colour image quantization algorithm

Many techniques have been proposed to quantize a digital colour image in order to reduce the representative number of colours to be suitable for presenting on different type of display screens. Most of the techniques are targeted for implementation on a general purpose multitasking computer with low restriction on resource utilization. The drawback of these techniques relies on the fact that they cannot fulfil the requirement of some applications with real-time constraint and limited resources. In this paper, the most suitable algorithm for hardware implementation is reviewed and the details of its implementation and experimentation which is focused on the colour palette generation stage are presented. The implementation given in this paper is for use in construction of colour palette image compression for real-time transferring of video data to an LED display board. It can also be adapted to use as a dedicated computer hardware for other real-time image compression applications.