Palette re-ordering is a well known and very effective approach for improving the compression of color indexed images. If the spatial distribution of the indexes in the image is smooth, greater compression ratios may be obtained. As known, obtaining an optimal re-indexing scheme is not a trivial task. In this paper we provide a novel algorithm for palette re-ordering problem making use of a Motor Map neural network. Experimental results show the real effectiveness of the proposed method both in terms of compression ratio and zeroorder entropy of local differences. Also its computational complexity is competitive with previous works in the field.