The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Sect. 2, we present an introduction to the standard K-SOM quantizer algorithm and the outcome from our experiments in studying the impact of internal data representations;both codebooks and learning kernel, in K-SOM quantizers on the resulting image quality. This is then followed by the proposed hardware friendly approaches to leverage the quantized image quality in Sect. 3. In Sect. 4, the implementation, experimental results and discussion are given. Finally, the paper is concluded and future work is given in Sect. 5.