[jcupitt]

Hello, libvips author here, you can get it to do the OKLab averaging for you. For example, using pyvips (ahem, untested):

image = pyvips.Image.new_from_file(filename, access="sequential")

scale = min(200 / image.width, 200 / image.height)

thumbnail = image.colourspace("oklab").resize(scale).extract_bands(0, n=3)

rgbf = thumbnail.write_to_memory()

That'll stream the source image and make a RGBRGBRGB memory buffer of single precision floats. You could perhaps use kernel="linear" and avoid any ringing from lanczos3.

I think I would downsample in a linear light space, like scRGB. Averaging there means averaging photons, which will surely be better than OKLab. Maybe switch to OKLab for clustering. Though of course I've not tested it.