Variable neighbourhood search for colour image quantization

^** Email: nenad.mladenovic{at}brunel.ac.uk Colour image quantization is a data compression technique thatreduces the total set of colours in a digital image to a representativesubset. This problem is first expressed as a large M-medianone. The advantages of this model over the usual minimum sum-of-squaresmodel are discussed first and then, the heuristic based on variableneighbourhood search metaheuristic is applied to solve it. Computationalexperience proves that this approach compares favourably withtwo other recent state-of-the-art heuristics, based on geneticand particle swarm searches.