Quantization is a lossy (some of the information is lost) compression technique achieved by compressing a range of values to a single quantum value. Image or color quantization is a technique where the number of colors is reduced; this is important for displaying images on devices that support a limited number of colors and for efficiently compressing certain kinds of images. Most editors and many operating systems have built-in support for color quantization. The reduced representative colors are called color palette. The quantization process should be optimized as possible so that not much information is lost and the new quantized image should differ as little as possible from the original image.
- Image compression: by reducing the number of bits per pixels without affecting the image view. It’s used as a step in the compression pipeline of most common formats like JPEG and MPEG.
- Image Filtering: for noise smoothing and for deconvolving images that have been blurred.
- Target different devices: color quantization is critical for displaying images with many colors on devices that can only display a limited number of colors
