  Color quantization is an important operation with many applications in
graphics and image processing. Most quantization methods are essentially based
on data clustering algorithms. However, despite its popularity as a general
purpose clustering algorithm, k-means has not received much respect in the
color quantization literature because of its high computational requirements
and sensitivity to initialization. In this paper, we investigate the
performance of k-means as a color quantizer. We implement fast and exact
variants of k-means with several initialization schemes and then compare the
resulting quantizers to some of the most popular quantizers in the literature.
Experiments on a diverse set of images demonstrate that an efficient
implementation of k-means with an appropriate initialization strategy can in
fact serve as a very effective color quantizer.
