hi, I've just started my first processing applet, for now a still simple paint applet using 4 colors. Here my question: i'm looking for a smart way of getting the amount of colored pixels (for each color), (can be a rough estimate, based on percentage, so say 30% red, 20% green, 20% blue, 5% orange, and 25% not filled). How would i approach this?, because iterating each frame though all of my windows pixels, and checking what color they have seems a bit cpu intensive. I'm thinking of pattern recongnition, or downsampling techniques. What i intend to do is the following. Each color can represent a certain amount of m^2, so I can use my applet as a urban design sketch tool. The amount of m^2 is a valuable indicator for a sites development.

Let me give an example: I start painting red shapes (i.e houses) in my window. It tells me I have 20% covered in red, but my design constraint is 14%, I'd like to see the program self-reorganizes the red pixels (using some algorithm , like cellular automata maybe), to meet my set constraint of 14%. Anyone knows some examples that incorporate this principle??

thx for the feedback.

PS: for m^2 I meant square meter m², the SI derived unit of area.