Image Compression using K-means Clustering : Colour Quantization

This post is a simple yet illustrative application of K-means clustering technique. Using K-means clustering, we will perform quantization of colours present in the image which will further help in compressing the image. In a coloured image, each pixel is of size 3 bytes (RGB), where each colour can have intensity values from 0 to 255. Following combinatorics, the total number of colours which can be represented are 256*256*256. Practically, we are able to visualize only a few colours in an image.