billd@celerity.UUCP (Bill Davidson) (05/24/89)
Well, I tried my idea for modifying the median cut method by cutting at a point in which each half of the array represented roughly the same number of pixels in the original image. I got varying results. Some images were *slightly* degraded. You could only tell in detailed spots with rare colors. This is rare in the images I have. Several images showed no discernable affect over just using a standard median cut and doing a weighted average for each box. A few images were vastly improved. Ray-tracing images which involved shiny reflective spheres lost almost all banding! I really had to look close to see any at all. The background had been badly banded before and it's banding disappeared. I expected a slight improvement and I got a vast improvement. So, what's the verdict? Did I re-invent the wheel (or at least a spoke :-) or what? If somebody doesn't say something first, I'll probably try to figure the mean quantization error for the entire image with of these variants and try to figure best/worst case scenarios. Bill Davidson ...!{ucsd,sdsu,fpssun,cogen,chip,photon}!celerity!billd