This subject was well covered on OpenCV 2 Computer Vision Application Programming Cookbook:
Chapter 2 shows a few reduction operations, one of them demonstrated here in C++ and later in Python:
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <opencv2/highgui/highgui.hpp>
#include <opencv2/imgproc/imgproc.hpp>
void colorReduce(cv::Mat& image, int div=64)
{
int nl = image.rows; // number of lines
int nc = image.cols * image.channels(); // number of elements per line
for (int j = 0; j < nl; j++)
{
// get the address of row j
uchar* data = image.ptr<uchar>(j);
for (int i = 0; i < nc; i++)
{
// process each pixel
data[i] = data[i] / div * div + div / 2;
}
}
}
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
// Load input image (colored, 3-channel, BGR)
cv::Mat input = cv::imread(argv[1]);
if (input.empty())
{
std::cout << "!!! Failed imread()" << std::endl;
return -1;
}
colorReduce(input);
cv::imshow("Color Reduction", input);
cv::imwrite("output.jpg", input);
cv::waitKey(0);
return 0;
}
Below you can find the input image (left) and the output of this operation (right):
The equivalent code in Python would be the following:
(credits to @eliezer-bernart)
import cv2
import numpy as np
input = cv2.imread('castle.jpg')
# colorReduce()
div = 64
quantized = input // div * div + div // 2
cv2.imwrite('output.jpg', quantized)