A Very Fast Algorithm for Image Display With a Limited Number of Colors

A new algorithm for calculation of colormap and pixel mapping from true color images is proposed. It represents a trade-off between speed and quality, where little degradation of quality with respect to traditional algorithms leads to dramatic speed improvements. A colormap for video-sized image with respective pixel mapping can be computed in less then 2 seconds on a 25 Mhz i486 PC. The algorithm is particularly useful in multimedia and image database application, where response time is critical.