Recently, Kurdthongmee [13] reported the success of a single moderate density FPGA implementation of a K-SOM with a real-time performance and acceptable image quality. The proposed architecture was based wholly on unsigned integer arithmetic with an operator sharing concept. The maximum obtainable colour palette size was 128 9 2 or 256 colours when synthesized on a single XC2VP100 FPGA device running at a maximum frequency of 24 MHz. This was equivalent to a maximum frame rate of 25 fps for an input image of resolution 640 9 480 pixels. As an extension to the architecture in [13] which relied on using a winner-take-all (WTA)scheme, Kurdthongmee [14] proposed a more hardware centric K-SOM algorithm taking into account a topological relationship among neural cells. This improved the convergence rate of the K-SOM algorithm and, in turn,increased the quality of a quantized image significantly.Apart from only updating the winner neural cell, the newly proposed algorithm updates its surrounding neighbours with variable learning rates depending on their relative distances with the winner neural cell. The‘‘update-and-use’’ scheme was proposed and used in order to guarantee that all neural cells were visited only once in the weight update stage.