Image Quantization with K-Means

Quantization refers to a technique where we express a range of values by a single quantum value. For images, this means that we can compress an entire color range into one specific color. This technique is lossy i.e. we intentionally lose information in favor of lower memory consumption. In this tutorial, I will show you how to implement color quantization yourself with very few lines of code. We are going to use Python with scikit-learn, numpy, PIL, and matplotlib. Lets's start by downloading the beautiful image of "Old Man of Storr" taken by Pascal van Soest which we will work with (if you are on Windows or do not have access to wget simply download the image and save it as image.jpeg):