michael@orcisi.UUCP (01/20/87)
This isn't a topic I claim to know very much about but it seems that an exact histogram of the 24-bit image would be useful for determining the "colour content" of an image. One way of doing this is to treat the pixels in your frame buffer as a linear list of integers and (quick)sort them. After you run-length encode the sorted image, the result represents an exact histogram of the original image. I had microcoded the quicksort on the Adage/Ikonas 3000 at the University of Waterloo and it took a couple of seconds for the sort to complete and was entertaining to watch.