Color reduction based on ant colony

In this article a method for color reduction based on ant colony algorithm is presented. Generally color reduction involves two steps: choosing a proper palette and mapping colors to this palette. This article is about the first step. Using ant colony algorithm, pixel clusters are formed based on their colors and neighborhood information to make the final palette. A comparison between the results of the proposed method and some other methods is presented. There are some parameters in the proposed method which can be set based on user needs and priorities. This increases the flexibility of the method.