Patent ID: 7346631

Claim:
A system, comprising: an image data store containing a plurality of images; a global color table, wherein the global color table is calculated from the image data store by quantizing images in the image data store to determine a set of quantized image colors, and selecting colors for the global color table using the set of quantized image colors to minimize error across the image data store; and a computer program comprising instructions operable to: receive an original image having one or more colors from the image data store; estimate a number of distinct colors in the original image; use the estimated number to determine a quantization number for the original image; determine a quantized image by quantizing the original image into the quantization number of quantized image colors; and map each of the quantized image colors to a color of the global color table; generate a color feature vector of one or more color descriptors to represent the original image, each color descriptor corresponding to quantized image color of the quantized image, each color descriptor comprising (i) a color index that references a location of the respective quantized image color in the global color table and (ii) a relative occurrence of the respective quantized image color within the quantized image.