That would be a rather wide field of theory, since one can go about this process in a large amount of different ways that differ greatly in complexity and quality of the results, and is highly dependent on the desired output format (how many colors per palette, format of the colors inside the palette, fixed colors from preset palettes or partial palettes to consider, etc.).
These three articles may give you a decent entry point:
This one surely will,
that will come up fast and
that here gives a rather coarse but useful text to get you accustomed to some of the terminology you will come across.
PS: I'd be interested in the Photoshop-Clone you/we program here. It would be nice to see a version on here one day
PPS: It still is unclear waht the source images are, but I assume it's going to be "arbitrary". G32 transforms everything into 24/32 Bit
RGB color space anyways if I recall correctly. But beware! Especially when it comes to (semi-)professional use, 24/32 Bit images is not the high end, and many formats desired by printing companies/processes may not even be supported by G32, nor would they be able to be worked with using G32 properly. There even are image formats out there, that work with colors represented by float values, maybe even CMYK and others, and to make things worse: Color-profiles. There you should ask yourself how professional you want to get (or what your audience is).
"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When a million people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion." (Richard Dawkins)