Color Reduction in Hand-drawn Persian Carpet Cartoons before Discretization using image segmentation and finding edgy regions

In this paper, we present a method for color reduction of Persian carpet cartoons that increases both speed and accuracy of editing. Carpet cartoons are in two categories: machine-printed and hand-drawn. Hand-drawn cartoons are divided into two groups: before and after discretization. The purpose of this study is color reduction of hand-drawn cartoons before discretization. The proposed algorithm consists of the following steps: image segmentation, finding the color of each region, color reduction around the edges and final color reduction with C-means. The proposed method requires knowing the desired number of colors in any cartoon. In this method, the number of colors is not reduced to more than about 1.3 times of the desired number. Automatic color reduction is done in such a way that final manual editing to reach the desired colors is very easy.