Get the character dominant from a string - c

Question

Okay.. according to the title i am trying to figure out a way - function that returns the character that dominates in a string. I might be able to figure it out.. but it seems something is wrong with my logic and i failed on this. IF someome can come up with this without problems i will be extremelly glad thank you.
I say "in a string" to make it more simplified. I am actually doing that from a buffered data containing a BMP image. Trying to output the base color (the dominant pixel).
What i have for now is that unfinished function i started:
RGB
bitfox_get_primecolor_direct
(char *FILE_NAME)
{
dword size = bmp_dgets(FILE_NAME, byte);
FILE* fp = fopen(convert(FILE_NAME), "r");
BYTE *PIX_ARRAY = malloc(size-54+1), *PIX_CUR = calloc(sizeof(RGB), sizeof(BYTE));
dword readed, i, l;
RGB color, prime_color;
fseek(fp, 54, SEEK_SET); readed = fread(PIX_ARRAY, 1, size-54, fp);
for(i = 54; i<size-54; i+=3)
{
color = bitfox_pixel_init(PIXEL_ARRAY[i], PIXEL_ARRAY[i+1], PIXEL_ARRAY[i+2);
memmove(PIX_CUR, color, sizeof(RGB));
for(l = 54; l<size-54; l+=3)
{
if (PIX_CUR[2] == PIXEL_ARRAY[l] && PIX_CUR[1] == PIXEL_ARRAY[l+1] &&
PIX_CUR[0] == PIXEL_ARRAY[l+2])
{
}
Note that RGB is a struct containing 3 bytes (R, G and B).
I know thats nothing but.. thats all i have for now.
Is there any way i can finish this?

Answer 1

If you want this done fast throw a stack of RAM at it (if available, of course). You can use a large direct-lookup table with the RGB trio to manufacture a sequence of 24bit indexes into a contiguous array of counters. In partial-pseudo, partial code, something like this:
// create a zero-filled 2^24 array of unsigned counters.
uint32_t *counts = calloc(256*256*256, sizeof(*counts));
uint32_t max_count = 0
// enumerate your buffer of RGB values, three bytes at a time:
unsigned char rgb[3];
while (getNextRGB(src, rgb)) // returns false when no more data.
{
uint32_t idx = (((uint32_t)rgb[0]) << 16) | (((uint32_t)rgb[1]) << 8) | (uint32_t)rgb[2];
if (++counts[idx] > max_count)
max_count = idx;
}
R = (max_count >> 16) & 0xFF;
G = (max_count >> 8) & 0xFF;
B = max_count & 0xFF;
// free when you have no more images to process. for each new
// image you can memset the buffer to zero and reset the max
// for a fresh start.
free(counts);
Thats it. If you can afford to throw a big hulk of memory at this a (it would be 64MB in this case, at 4 bytes per entry at 16.7M entries), then performing this becomes O(N). If you have a succession of images to process you can simply memset() the array back to zeros, clear max_count, and repeat for each additional file. Finally, don't forget to free your memory when finished.
Best of luck.